


400 Lux

by tothemoon



Series: ad astra [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (and still find a way to come together), Actors, Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, Amusement Parks, Different Dimensions, Friends to Lovers, Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, Magical Realism, Oikawa POV, Rating May Change, Slow Build, in which oikawa and iwa-chan are from different dimensions, liminal space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 00:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4457729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Oikawa Tooru and Iwaizumi Hajime come from different dimensions (but still find a way to be together, anyway).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sunrise, sunset

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always really liked the theme of _opposites_ and _the beginning and the end_ when it comes to iwaoi and their dynamic, so this fic was a product of that. Come along for the ride if you like surreal elements, high school paranormal clubs, amusement parks, and actors on the rise. This is also my first time writing from an Oikawa Tooru POV, so this has been all sorts of exciting!
> 
> Also, a giant thank you to this tumblr text post and tumblr user illizarov, who showed me this cool text post about [liminal spaces](http://illizarov.tumblr.com/post/123991071831/bookshop-caramelandgravy-duskenpath)!

 

 

 

"His name is Tooru." 

"Oh? Hello, Tooru-kun, it's certainly nice to meet you." 

"And your son?"

"Hajime. Iwaizumi Hajime."

When the two of them are children, the sprawling sort still in their strollers at an amusement park, Oikawa Tooru is the first to climb out from his seat and run off towards the commotion going on by the amphitheater. His mother catches him by the waist, hoists him up with indomitable strength, and presses him against her shoulder, coos whispered softly to stop him from crying. The one and half year old does just so anyway, because children his age should be no where near the howl and horror of an amusement park in summer, and he's wriggling and excited and all sorts of _born to run_.

"Your son is certainly the adventurous type," another mother tells her, while tending to her own son in his carriage. Iwaizumi Hajime has a habit of dozing off when the blankets are too comfortable, and today is no exception. From his mother's perch, Tooru watches him closely, coy by the shield of his mother's wide-brimmed sun hat.

Tooru's mother laughs and pats her son on the back, his fussiness over before it ever really started. "Oh, sometimes Tooru's just so hard to handle, but I can't fault him for wanting to have his fun here, too." Tooru babbles on her shoulder, almost on the precipice of real words, and reaches for the other child in his bed. Iwaizumi stirs in his sleep but doesn't wake.

"Ah, Hajime darling, do you want to say hi to Tooru-kun?" Iwaizumi's mother asks, wiggling one of her son's toes. He grunts, swatting her hand away, and the two mothers know not to bother him. Tooru reaches for him anyway, whines with tiny hands outstretched, but his mother tries to soothe him away.

"I think they like each other," Tooru's mother giggles. "I've never seen Tooru so _grabby_ over another baby." 

Iwaizumi's mother sighs. "I'm sorry my son can't return the sentiment. He's usually so happy to see the summertime. Come on, you sleepyhead!" she jokes. Tooru tries to repeat her words, fists clenched and words not quite formed. The mothers laugh once more, just as Tooru's father and sister come calling from down the lane.

"Ah, looks like they're done at the gift shop," Tooru's mother says, putting her son back in his stroller. "Maybe it wasn't the best idea to bring a baby to an amusement park, after all. Otou-san and his sister are hogging up all the fun, aren't they?" she asks, half-meant for her son. 

"I get that for sure," Iwaizumi's mother laughs along with her one last time. "But maybe it was meant to be, you know?" she darts a glance between the two children, like she'd like to build bridges between them.

"Ah yes, _the destined meeting between the sleepy prince Hajime-kun and the fussy demon Tooru-kun,"_ Tooru's mother tells her in teasing, ever dramatic.

"May the fates be kind to them." Iwaizumi's mother smiles like she might believe in such things. Much more discerning, Tooru's mother takes in such wishful thinking and presses it, carefully, to her heart.

"Kind as kind can get," she repeats in a whisper. 

"Well, you better get going," Iwaizumi's mother says, waving her along. "We're always here in the park, so no need for sad goodbyes."

"All right, then," says Tooru's mother. "Say bye to Iwaizumi-kun, Tooru," she chants into his carriage, back at her son.

With hand held out once more, Tooru reaches for the other boy in his rolling bed, cries of _ah! ah!_ lost under the commotion of the park. He falls back on his pillow when the other baby doesn't respond, mothers parting their ways—one towards the north end, the other south—and starts screaming louder than he ever had in his life.

In the other carriage, a sleeping baby wakes, hands reaching out, too late, in _hello, it's nice to meet you._

 

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Lux : **the official SI unit of illuminance and luminous emittance.

 

 

 

 **400 Lux** **:** sunset or sunrise on a clear day.

 

 

 

 

The first time Tooru sneaks into _Sunrise Garden,_ he is seven, desperate, and looking to steal a stuffed dog. 

By the time on his watch, always about five minutes off on the second hand, it is around 9:00pm, seven hours since burying his _actual_ dog, Mikan, the family pet and Tooru's only friend since moving to the city of Sendai. Persistent, he keeps pace down the winding alley of carnival games, glancing into the hollow stands where the prizes should be hung, and only makes out darkness, shivering in the lateness of summer season's past _._ Even against the breeze, Tooru refuses to let go of the unused ticket stub in his hands and forges on anyway. _I'm going to have my day here,_ he tells himself, because it's been a long one and he's still got nothing to show for it.

Tooru had marked his course. If it weren't for Mikan getting hit by a car on the corner, he would've come today to enjoy the rides and eat _taiyaki_ and electric blue cotton candy. He would've touched the sky by the loop of the Ferris wheel or the momentary peak of a roller coaster. He would've gawked at the mascots and clapped at the themed shows. He would've won stuffed animals, _lots and lots of them_ , for Mikan to chew on back at home. He would've... _he would've—no_. Tooru tells himself to hold his tongue and sweep away the turbulent thoughts, the _should-have-beens,_ but it is a truth universally known that they always come howling back anyway.

"Icelandic sheepdogs live an average of twelve years," Tooru repeats to himself with eyes closed, sniffling back while trying not to trip up on the cobblestone. "And Mikan-chan lived fifteen!" Deep breath, _breathe easy_. “Fifteen!” 

At the constant reassurance, he tells himself to count such blessings, even if they only come as consolation prizes. 

(While another half of him— _selfish_ and he knows it—wishes for more to come, too. _Blessings_ , that is, and less of the pitied variety.)

Tooru casts his tears away, wiping them off a sweater sleeve. 9:05PM flashes across his wrist, and he thinks that he should’ve been in bed by now, telling Mikan about the fireworks he saw an hour before closing time, an annual tradition for the last day of the season here at _Sunrise Garden._

He takes another deep breath, the millionth since sneaking in through the haunted funhouse by the fences (where he had expertly noticed that the _faux-in-shambles_ fence motif was in fact, just an _actual_ rotting fence motif in dire, _dire_ need of repairs). Given his size, sneaking under the cobwebs was almost too easy, and dodging guards had been like playing a super extensive game of _hide-and-seek_ (which was something Tooru never, ever lost).

“You’re going to do this, Tooru,” Tooru tells himself once more, shaking his head free of clutter, “for Mikan-chan!” With a stiff lip and not another word, he wills himself into believing that _trespassing_ has been one of his better ideas.

Tooru stops in his tracks when he sees one of the stands light up at the end of the lane. Barring the urban legends, the ghosts that might run the park at night, he runs at it homebound, flip-flops clicking behind him and flashlight switched off, and gleams up at the stuffed animals dangling by the awning. None of the them look like his dog, not even in the slightest bit, but Tooru thinks he’ll take what he can at this point, given the trouble it took to run away from home in the first place.

He feels himself hold his breath when the jokey music streams from the booth. _Hello, ghosts,_ Tooru can’t help but snicker to himself, in reply to the bored kids and their classroom tall tales. _I’m here to reclaim this day._ Chest puffed out, he gives himself one last push and comes upon a shooting gallery. Two fake rifle guns, attached to mounts and ready to shoot, perk towards the targets on the wall, while a few stuffed bears have started a tea party on the highest shelves. _That’ll do,_ Tooru thinks _._ Taking a hold of one of them to steady himself, Tooru throws his backpack off and leaves it on the ground next to him, perching knees-first on one of the seats before climbing up on the counter. Reaching forward, he groans out a _come on_ when he can’t quite reach, tips grazing the edge of fur. _Come on,_ he wills himself once more. _Come on. For Mikan-chan._ Teeth gritting, he refuses to let this day end as a complete and utter loss.

“Hey, what the hell are you—”

With a gasp and a squeak, Tooru falls off the edge of the counter and right into the other side of the stand. He stays there for a moment, more embarrassed than hurt, and shuts his eyes closed when tears begin to well in his eyes again. He follows up by burying his face in bent arms, opting to lie amongst the boxed animals and packets of soft pellet ammunition. When he feels the stranger climb up on the counter, feet knocking against the wall, Tooru just peeks up with watery eyes and meets another boy about his age.

He's frowning, and he’s got his sweater sleeves rolled up like all the other tough kids he's seen in movies. Tooru thinks he looks as bristly as his short dark hair, and he knows he’s right when the stranger opens his mouth to _probably_ yell at him, because he’s heard the urban legends, that _ghost children are especially naggy,_ but Oikawa Tooru is _no goddamned mood to get chased out today,_ whether this kid’s a ghost or not—

“Let me have this,” Tooru interrupts the other boy, rubbing at his owned banged-up nose, one that might or might not be broken at this point. “Please, I swear you can haunt me later.”

“ _What_?”

“I missed closing day at Sunrise Garden,” Tooru explains, still a ruddy mess, but he doesn’t care, because his auntie’s always told him he was a pretty crier. “It was supposed to be my first visit here, but I didn’t get the chance to come,” he continues to choke out, pulling out his ticket. “ _See?_ Unused and everything.”

“ _That_ is not my problem," comes the answer.

“Please hear me out, _ghost-chan_!” Tooru continues on. Upon hearing the unwarranted nickname, boy’s frown deepens into a new spectacle—a grimace, thoroughly disgusted, maybe—and Tooru quickly learns that children can also scowl like middle-aged fathers.

“Okay. _What is it, then?_ ” the boy crosses his arms, raising an eyebrow.

Tooru swallows. "My dog...um, he _died_ today." 

At the admission, the stranger visibly lightens, shoulders buoyant, face forgetting to furrow. He keeps on the edge of his impromptu seat, still cautious, but Tooru watches the way he leans closer, and the gesture, no matter how miniscule, is enough to let him continue on.

By the corner of his vision, blurred with tears, Tooru recognizes just the smallest admission of warmth.

“It happened this morning, right when I was tying my shoes for the park. My sister was going to take me, but then Mikan-chan got hit by a car and I didn’t have the chance.” Tooru feels the tears well up in his eyes again, but he is resilient enough to battle the grime in his throat. “But you know what?” he asks next, nodding to himself. “I’m still going to have a good day, and I’m going to steal a bunch of stuffed animals and ride on the rides. It’s all for _Mikan-chan_! And it’s fine—it’s all fine, and _I’m_ fine and—”

Tooru doesn’t get to continue when a stuffed bear hits him on the lap. He peers up, eyes stinging from the urge to cry— _and damn, he thinks he might really, really cry—_ when he sees the other boy perched over, feet curled on the edge of the counter. He’s got something reluctant on his face, glances right on the urge of looking away altogether; but when Tooru holds a hand up, a quiet plea to help him get on his feet, he takes it anyway.

“Come on,” the boy insists. “No need to hide,” he tells Tooru, like he knows anything at all.

“Okay,” Tooru tells him right back, letting him nag on anyway. 

And when their hands touch, Tooru _really, really does cry_ for the first time all day. When he finds the will to stand, he tucks his chin downward, embarrassed as all hell, but he keeps himself up nonetheless. He takes the stuffed bear with him, tucked under an arm, and makes it back out on the lane with the stranger.

Tooru lets himself cry, because loss is loss and there’s no point in fighting it, because Mikan-chan was important to him, _really, really important to him,_ but he thinks he might find a way to something happy, too. Because even if he’ll never get to see this boy again, even if ghosts were meant to fade back to unearthly spaces, even if this kid might just be a figment of his imagination, at least he doesn’t have to be alone tonight. This is what he clings onto, body all achy from sobbing, when the park lights up around them and counted blessings might mean more than consolation prizes. 

“You’re the nicest ghost I’ve ever met,” Tooru tells the other boy, when their hands unclasp but they don’t go their separate ways. Hands in his pockets, sleeves still glued to the crease of bent arms, the kid stares up, still as cool as the deepening night.

"I don't know where you got that idea, but I'm no ghost."

Tooru's eyes go wide. "You're not? Then you must’ve snuck in too, right?" He tries not to sound too excited when he asks.

"Something like that."

Stifling a smile, a definite failure in being coy, the other boy speeds up, leaves Tooru in the dust, but never strays too far. Feet almost tripping up on the cobblestone, Tooru follows him anyway.

"What's your name, then?" Tooru asks. “You have to tell me now! We’re in this together, ghost-chan!”

“Will you stop calling me _ghost-chan_ if I do?”

Tooru catches up, nods at him with a bit of a laugh, tiny and barely held, but genuine all the same. He kind of likes the way it leaves his mouth. “Of course," he says, only half-lying. 

"My name is Iwaizumi Hajime," the boy says, with a name as sturdy as the way he holds his back. He walks on again after that, footfalls heavier than Tooru's, steps neither too rushed or too ambling. _Just right._ When Tooru gulps down, he sucks in a deep breath and mouths the name to remember it. _Iwaizumi Hajime._ He thinks, past the fickleness of forgetting names, of all the other kids he’s never thought to keep, that there’s a phenomenon in trying to remember. _Iwaizumi Hajime._ With tight lips, sealed by mashing, Tooru stops himself from getting too carried away and stops practicing the name. 

“And what’s yours?” Iwaizumi asks next. Tooru beams up, wipes the rest of his tears away, and catches up to him.

“Oikawa Tooru!” he shouts out, when he decides to _maybe_ enjoy the worst day of his life instead.

  
  


 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time morning comes, all hazy orange and glinting golden, the park fades with the new day and lets Tooru breathe easy. After a night of wandering sunrise garden, of stealing from gift shops and cutting non-existent lines, of riding the Ferris wheel about ten thousand times and climbing fences to sit on the artificial shore of an artificial lake, the two of them have found peace at the foot of an abandoned amphitheater stage—one of the biggest in all of Japan, by Tooru’s prior research—slumped against the hardwood and ready to sleep the rest of the day away. But Tooru makes himself sit up, examines the light in all of its splendor, and finds the will to laugh. He feels himself tear up again, just by the tiniest gulp, and swallows it down without a hitch this time. 

“Mikan-chan was this color, sorta. Like, all bright and soft,” Tooru muses about the sunrise, climbing up back on his feet and looking towards daybreak. Iwaizumi just nods with all the other miscellaneous facts Tooru’s presented, ones teetering on the edge of importance but never delving too deep; he just finds the most interesting things about himself, because he thinks that what people like to hear— _interesting—_ and maybe it’ll distract from the fact he’s cried more often than not in Iwaizumi’s company so far. He imagines it, the other boy sitting at the table, or huddled around with the tons of friends he must have back at home. _I met this kid, Oikawa Tooru—_ if he's even bothered to remember Tooru’s name in the first place— _and he’s been in three TV commercials. For toothpaste, melon pops, and cat food, pretty enough for every spotlight under the sun. He likes milk bread and aliens and doesn’t cry when he gets shots, and he’s really decent at mathematics and getting his homework in on time._ Tooru imagines this, finds himself satisfied, and comes slinking back into his seat.

_He’s not the best kid, but a good kid, and boy, does he try hard._

“I have to get going soon,” says Iwaizumi, neither in relief or fear of parting. Oikawa pretends he doesn’t feel the latter. “You should too, or else your mother might worry,” he recommends further.

Tooru shrugs. “I guess so.” He remembers Iwaizumi telling him about coming from the north end of the park, how he himself had snuck in through the south, and that the amphitheater lay perfectly in the middle of it all, like the reassurance of some perfectly made equator.

“Five more minutes,” Iwaizumi says, looking away, voice all hushed. 

“You must really like me, Iwa-chan,” Tooru teases him, still trying the name out on his tongue. He decides he likes it.

“Don’t call me that,” Iwaizumi insists for the hundredth time, but he seems too tired to protest things further. Oikawa takes this as some sort of tacit acceptance, and he gleams up at him like he doesn’t want any of this to end. Selfishly, he thinks again of all the other kids Iwaizumi Hajime might be playing with, his world outside this one, and decides that maybe he can’t see him as a stranger. Maybe he doesn’t want him to be. It’s a strange feeling, wandering into territory like potential friendship, the adventure of it. _I’d like to see you again. I’d like to be your friend._ Oikawa stops himself from such forthright things, sentiment seeping through his closed mouth anyway. He thinks it builds up, aches to the point of blushing bright red, and lets Iwaizumi know everything anyway.

To this, Iwaizumi merely blinks, eyes narrowed and certainly skeptical, but he doesn't run or push himself away. He stays, and Tooru gets the sense that some things don't have to be said.

"We should play again sometime," Tooru reaches forward to say instead, so tired he's lost at least some of his natural inhibition, and Iwaizumi just flinches in his seat but doesn't quake any further. 

Iwaizumi shrugs. "Um." He frowns, eyeing Tooru up and down. He’s used that, maybe, because the other kids do that to him, too. He's gotten too good at reading their expressions, the people who pass judgment, their ugly, ugly questions, right on their tongues but never said: _do I really want to play with that weird kid in the cat food commercials? Isn’t he obsessed with aliens?_ When he remembers the looks on the other kids’ faces, Tooru shrinks back, thinks that maybe he’s gone too far again this time, and comes to the verge of telling Iwaizumi, _ah, just forget it, you don’t have to—_

“Sure,” Iwaizumi finishes. “I mean...you’re kind of _weird,_ and you cry kinda ugly, but why not?” He peers back at Tooru, all grimaces, but there's something relenting about them this time, and they come out almost comical.

" _What_?" Tooru wasn't expecting that.

“And you know, even if you _do_ look like that when you cry, you should let it all out, I think. Like, your face is all red, and you look like you might explode," Iwaizumi continues on. "So if you need to cry the _next_ time we hang out, don't worry about holding it in."

" _Iwa-chan_ ," Tooru calls out, all sorts of choked up.

"How many times do I have to tell you _not_ to call me that?" 

"S-sorry," Tooru can't help but giggle out, wiping away the snot on his sleeve. "But, really, let's meet again! The cake shop, two blocks away from here, by the south end of Sunrise Garden,” he urges.

"You mean _sunset._ " At this, Iwaizumi frowns. “And what do you mean the south end? That bakery's by the _north end,_ where the entrance is."

"The one called the _Velvet Rose?_ "

"Yeah."

“See, no, I know that's by the _south._ _And_ I’ve read the map a billion times, Iwa-chan. Is there even an entrance on the north end?”

“That’s the _only_ entrance,” Iwaizumi asserts. "And that's north." 

“You need to learn better directions,” Oikawa says, digging his map out of his backpack.

Iwaizumi shakes his head, grabbing for said map. “I don’t, and I _know_ I don’t, because I’m the _—”_  

“ _Hajime-kun!_ ” At the sound of a woman’s voice, sharp and accusational, Iwaizumi winces and drops the folded paper in his hands. Her heels are sharp against the cobblestone, and she’s got a cup of coffee, steaming, in her hands. _“Your father has been worried sick about you! I have not been paid to run after children!”_  

“Sorry,” Iwaizumi yells out, completely deadpan, linking his own hands together by the fingers and stretching them up to the sky. _Definitely cool,_ Tooru gapes, when Iwaizumi hops off the stage altogether and looks back at him. To Tooru, he says, "seven p.m. tomorrow, by that cake shop you mentioned. We can meet there, because it's easy to spot, right? With the bench in front? We can get milk bread." 

Down the lane, the woman spots him and points a painted finger, digging a walkie-talkie out of her blazer pocket and practically spitting into it. He thinks he hears a mix of the words _intruder_ and _trespassing,_ and Iwaizumi just looks like he's got bugs crawling all over his back over the sound of her threats.

"Go! _Oikawa_ , go!" 

"Iwa-chan, wait—" Hurriedly, Tooru remembers the gameplan, feet on the ground and ready to run. _The Velvet Rose Bakery! 7:00pm! Red bench!_  

 _(Iwa-chan remembered I like milk bread!)_  

_(He remembered my name!)_

" _Go!_ " Iwaizumi insists again, pulled to his caretaker like he's got no choice. "The cake shop, okay? Blue bench. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Tooru repeats back, smile stretching across his face with the day's first instance of reckless abandon. Under his arm, the stuffed bear stays safely in his possession, and he thinks about shaking Iwaizumi's hand to seal the pact, _tomorrow, I'm going to get to see my friend tomorrow,_ but he doesn't have the time when the two of them part ways. Held back by a pulled ear, Iwaizumi tells him to keep going, _don't stop,_ and Tooru only listens when the guards chase him down in a sputtering golf cart down the road. He runs, past the lit up stands, up the cobblestone paths, nearly tripping along the way, but he makes sure not to fall this time. _Not any time._ He knows he can't, when he's got plans to keep, and an _Iwa-chan_ to see. 

So Tooru slips away, past the hole in the fence and back to the world he knows, back to booking commercials and a home without Mikan-chan and the friends he's yet to make, because he feels the promise of one forming, his one and very own _Iwaizumi Hajime,_ and he knows persistence is key. _Just get through tomorrow._ At the mere chance of him, Tooru refuses to let any of this fly by.

  
  
  
  
  
  


* * *

 

 

 

 

"If I let you run off again, I'll never hear the end of it."

"But _onee-chan—"_

" _Please_ don't start whining on me, Tooru."

With a raised finger, one as sharp as the point of their mother's, Tooru's older sister loosens her tie, bends down to straighten her brother's, and mats his wavy hair back with the brush of a wooden comb. They have a commercial today for a car dealership in Sendai, one that she's missing her high school _occult club_ meeting just to take her brother to, and Tooru knows not to test her patience too much (though he'll do it anyway). Innocently, he just preens up, blinks a few times, and comes to the verge of another pretty please. Eiko, expecting it, conjures up a smirk, almost as if to say, _I know what you're doing, you little brat._  

"That cute little face of yours might work on the auntie up the block, but not me—"

"Would it work on _Minoru-kun?_ " Tooru continues, eyes narrowing. Checkmate. Eiko goes aghast, but it's hard not to notice the text messages with his name on them, or her head-in-the-stratosphere smiles at dinner time—their parents might be too tired to notice these things after a long day of work and whatnot, but Tooru never, ever misses a beat.

"Are you _blackmailing_ me?" she asks back, practically spitting fire, sputtering, red-faced along the way. "Because I'm not embarrassed by it, they can meet Minoru-kun at any time, _tomorrow_ , for all I care—"

"Then I'll be sure to set an extra bowl at the table—"

" _Tooru_! Fine! You got me!"

  
  
  
  
  


* * *

 

 

 

 

And this is the story of how Tooru got his sister to sit at the _Velvet Rose_ with him after filming at the car dealership. With Eiko's nose pointedly stuck in a _ghost stories_ anthology, Tooru plops down a plate of chocolate cake in front of her, a cup of coffee and fat-free milk, and two sugar packets on the side, just the way she likes it. Eiko lowers herself from the pages, tentatively accepts her brother’s unspoken apology, and sighs away the rest of her resentments. She pats him on the head, mussing his hair back to its natural graces, and when Tooru can’t help but laugh, excited over the prospect of 7:00pm, just ten minutes away, she sighs and tries to pretend she isn’t excited for him, too. She lifts a fork from the tray and offers Tooru the first bite, to which he doesn’t take. He’s too nervous to eat in all honesty, and he thinks he’d rather split some milk bread with Iwaizumi instead.

“You know, the club and I were going to play _kokkuri-san_ today, and I was really looking forward to it,” Eiko muses, “but this isn’t so bad, I guess.” She takes the first bite instead, smiles wide for a taste of heaven. “Especially if it means you won’t be moping around at home. Losing Mikan-kun was hard for me, too, but I know how much you loved him. He helped you through the move, didn't he?"

Tooru can’t deny that. “Mikan-chan would want me to make new friends.”

“We _all_ do,” his sister corrects him. “Anyway, you better make this a good playdate. I was going to ask the spirit board some really cool questions today, and _kokkuri-san_ would’ve given me the answers!”

“Like whether or not you’re going to marry _Minoru-kun_?” Tooru asks in teasing.

“Oh, quiet.”

Tooru just laughs and checks his watch again. Seven minutes to go, and he can’t help but hate how slowly time moves when he’s waiting for something to happen. “So,” he asks, to distract himself, “what would you have asked?”

Eiko lets a smile spread across her face, getting closer to her little brother from the other end of the table. “Ever heard of liminal space?”

Tooru shakes his head. He can’t say that he has.

“Well,” she continues on, “everyone and their mother thinks that occult club is for hunting ghosts and asking about future husbands. _But it’s more than that_ , I tell the masses. I mean, who’s the one that got you into aliens, huh?”

“ _You_ ,” Tooru chirps back with eyes rolled. Eiko never fails to get smug about that.

“Well, it’s not just aliens, either. It’s a lot of other stuff, like places you can’t explain, or _alternate universes._ That’s what I’ve been sort of interested in lately, when we’re not discussing the abundance of poltergeists in Nagano. You know, that’s a very real problem, too, and you’re always welcome to come on hunts with us...but, anyway—I was going to ask _kokkuri-san_ about the best liminal spaces in the prefecture.”

Tooru frowns and stares back down at the time again. Five minutes to go until Iwaizumi comes, and his knees have begun shaking under him. “Okay, then. What is _liminal space?_ ” he asks on anyway, half-listening so they can continue to fill the empty air. With a cock of an eyebrow, Eiko seems to understand but chooses to go on.

“Have you ever been somewhere and felt like...you’ve stepped in a whole other world? Some weird in-between where your chest gets all heavy for no reason?” she asks, past the rising steam of espresso, the taunt of a layered chocolate cake. “Like, an empty train platform, or the clearing to a forest on the side of the road? Maybe an empty room during an realtor’s showing?”

Tooru nods. Without explanation, he thinks he might understand what Eiko means. He remembers the dust on the tatami mats, the off-white walls of a three-room house not yet a home. He thinks of bus stops under heavy rain, and desolate shrines on Tuesday afternoons. Even Sunrise Gardenhad something about it, like breathing in something that wasn’t quite air, a denseness that felt like a slow and planetary dance. Like stepping into a _whole other world,_ not quite his, and not quite Iwaizumi’s either, but welcoming guests anyway—so _yes,_ Tooru thinks he might understand, even if it’s only at the very edge of comprehension, or the childish acceptance that things aren’t always as they seem.

"Strange space," Tooru coins it for himself. "A bridge," he finds himself blurting out next, all without meaning to. 

“Well, what do you think is the other side of such _strange spaces_? That bridge?” Eiko asks, putting her best _fortune teller’s_ guise back on, usually rehearsed for the likes of class-made cultural festivals and sleepovers. “Have you ever wondered about the places beyond this one?”

_beep da beep, beep da beep_

The both of them nearly jump out of their seats when they hear the alarm on Tooru’s watch go off. 7:00pm. Pushing his chair back, feet jumping out of the seat, Tooru nearly spills his sister’s coffee and knocks over the cake, but she beckons him to go on anyway, brimming over her brother's insistence to listen. 

“Go make a new friend, Tooru,” she urges with a hand under a chin, disregarding all her other talk. “I think it’ll be good for you.” She tells him she’ll be here the whole time, two hours and counting until the bakery closes at nine, and hands Tooru enough money for two loaves of milk bread. He takes it like a well wish, another blessing for good things, and presses a _thank you_ into his sister’s hand with a firm shake.

  
  
  
  
  


 

* * *

 

 

 

 

By the time Tooru’s eaten his share of the milk bread, it’s been twenty minutes and Iwaizumi Hajime is no where to be seen. He runs the pad of his index finger along the chipped red paint of the bench he’s planted himself on, night full on by now, and straightens his tie just in case Iwaizumi’s running late. He tucks his chin downward again, sighs out the fears resting in his belly, and nods to himself that everything will go according to plan.

To pass the time, he takes out his backpack and makes sure he still has everything in order. Today he’s left his new stuffed bear at home in lieu of other things: his favorite martian figurine, with one of the arms bent and chewed, but still the best; a guidebook to _the world’s coolest beetles,_ because he remembers Iwaizumi mentioning hobbies like bug catching; a DVD with all of the commercials he’s done to date, with the cat food one leading the pack; and his favorite picture of Mikan-chan, because he’s sure Iwaizumi might like him, too. Tooru sorts through all of these things, arranges and rearranges them again, and takes another deep and shaking breath when he adds five more minutes to his waiting time.

“Come on Iwa-chan,” he sighs out. His breath streams on like a gust from a passing train, and he hopes it reaches Iwaizumi, wherever he is.

  
  
  


 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

By eight, the streetlights flicker, mean and cackling, and tell Tooru to give up and go home. When his watch touches upon the time, one hour officially passed, the _beeps_ just add to every taunt he’s ever heard, the ones never spoken but written all over faces. _Do I really want to play with that weird kid in the cat food commercials? Isn’t he obsessed with aliens? Why should I want to be friends with him?_ Tooru swallows back something a mix of anxious and angry, but he refuses to admit that this is a lost cause.

“Come on, Iwa-chan,” he whispers, shivering a bit, breath smaller than ever but still seen in the night.

By eight-fifteen, his sister knocks on the display window, face more pained than he’d like to see.

“Do you want to go home, Tooru?” she comes outside to ask him, head peeking out the door.

He shakes his head, determined not to cry, and remembers something his mother once told him, for better or worse and all the bittersweet in between.

 _Oikawa Toorus_ are stubborn, and _Oikawa_ _Toorus_ stay. 

Past nine, past ten, and until his sister begs for the both of them to go home.

  
  
  


"I'm sorry, Tooru," Eiko tells him later, when he’s buried under a mess of blankets and trying not to cry.

 

 

 

"Maybe it just wasn't meant to be."

 

 

 

 

 

 

(But little does Tooru know that _Iwaizumi Hajimes_ tend to run along the same vein, too. On the other side of things, in another dimension where _heads_ turn into _tails_ , where Sunrise Garden might be called _Sunset_ instead, and bakery benches are blue instead of red, he waits, and waits, and waits, begrudging but anxious and refusing to give up. In his backpack, he keeps a book on aliens he loaned from the library, enough money for two pieces of cake out of courtesy, and a ticket to the opening day of Sunset Garden’s upcoming season. He waits, and waits, and waits, past eight-thirty to nine to ten, until his mother comes down the block, hand outstretched, with the offer to come home.)

(That night, in his bedroom alone, he wonders if meeting Oikawa Tooru was nothing but a passing dream, an anxious ghost by the wayward side.)

  
  
  


 


	2. ghost sighting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features the game of [kokkuri-san](http://www.scaryforkids.com/kokkuri-san), a variation of the ever-infamous ouija board played in Japan!

 

 

"Oikawa-kun," the photographer calls. "Could you turn your head this way? I'm not getting the right light for your face."

Tooru does what's he told, smile nothing but a second's worth for the camera. One month since losing Mikan-chan and Iwaizumi Hajime in one foul swoop, he's resigned himself to booking commercials and even an upcoming cameo in a teen drama on Tuesday evenings, a distraction made by memorized lines and the promise of multiple takes. Tooru immerses himself in the roles he takes on—the child in the backseat, a kid raising his hand to answer a question in class, the mean cousin who keeps hiding Takeo's house slippers—and pretends he is content.

"Perfect, just perfect," the director calls from the side.

When the praises start to come in, all in small doses but still well-meant, he decides that he might be okay with learning the rules of fooling them all _. Commit to it,_ he thinks, when his first winter without Mikan-chan settles in, and he decides he might want to take on acting in all seriousness. He spends his nights with rented DVDs and autobiographies, and picks up scripts for things he'd never thought he'd try out in the first place. On his walls, the drawn alien pictures lose their spots to classic movie posters, showcasing works like  _Seven Samurai_  and  _Kagemusha,_ taped alongside iconic scenes from  _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ and  _2001: A Space Odyssey._

"Oikawa-kun, over here."

When the photographer asks him to smile more this time, he beams like he means it. When they ask him to cry on cue, his head holds him back until it doesn't.

No one asks Tooru if any thing's wrong, and it's just the way he likes it.

“That looked very convincing today, Oikawa-kun,” a director tells him after he’s washed his face clean of the heat, to which Tooru says nothing at first. When the man expects answers, he feigns a grin and makes something up about extra lessons with his famous uncle in sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

“Tooru, are you going to join the occult club when you get to middle school?”

“Hm? Why would I?”

"I mean, you ask me for stories like I'm the newspaper." 

During his off-time, when he's tired of staring at subtitles or reading scripts, he lets his sister tell him ghost stories and other tales from the beyond. By the time he's nine, he knows all about the supposed  _passageways to hell_ , the voodoo straw dolls nailed to trees by spurned lovers, all the right questions to ask  _kokkuri-san_ and the spirit board. He follows his sister to shrines and haunted homes, and hears her talk about the possibility of past lives and alternate dimensions during subtitled reruns of  _The Twilight Zone_. They walk on Tooru's days off, through forest clearings and past roadside shrines, apt more to discuss about the fallacy of horror movies than his lack of definite friends.

"It looks like it's going to rain," Eiko observes one day, when they're waiting at a bus stop in Iwanuma. Neither one of them have brought an umbrella today, and the sky above has turned a menacing off-grey.

"We can just go home," suggests Tooru, feeling something ache in his joints anyway. "Those ancient roads can wait another day."

"I guess you're right. This bus stop is creeping me out, anyway. _Oh_ —you know what it reminds me of?"

Tooru rolls his eyes. "Don't say it."

" _Liminal spa—"_

_"Onee-chan."_

But when Tooru does let Eiko mention liminal space every now and then, over dinner or on the back deck after an autumn downpour—something that Tooru never, ever means to perk up to—he thinks of Iwaizumi Hajime and the confines of Sunrise Garden. Even at ten and three years passed, the weight of it makes his chest prickle, right to the point where he feels the need to draw his knees up and in. His sister, sympathetic, tells him that the rain will surely stop soon.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

By the winter of his eleventh year, on the day one year has died into the next, Tooru’s found himself at the Kanda Shrine in Chiyoda, cold and miserable but faking smiles for the gods on the grounds. His father had insisted on coming to this shrine in particular, due in part to the _entrepreneurial well-being_ the spirits seemed to promote here, because ‘ _the antiques aren’t going to sell themselves, you know?’_ The family of four had been to Tokyo countless times, for things like Tooru’s acting jobs and even looking into universities for Eiko, but the city during New Years was certainly, well, _new_. In the back of his mind, in a fleeting thought he just happened to catch, Tooru wonders if his prayers will come true so far from home. 

At the shrine, Tooru bows twice, claps his hands together the prescribed amount of times, and bows once more in tradition. He’s always been taught to count his blessings first, to whisper out quick _thank yous_ for his parts on television, his pretty face, his home and the delicious meals, even his recent entrance to Kitagawa Daiichi for middle school, but there’s always something a little more exciting about making wishes for the upcoming year.

The thing is, Tooru never really has anything in mind when he gets to this point: he just lets it all bubble up to the surface, everything he might’ve wanted this past year but kept buried away. Whatever breaks through first, gets said first. Tooru lets himself have this reprieve, admissions still kept quiet.

 _To grow another twenty centimeters. A recurring role on a TV series. New friends in a new school._  

_To see him again._

At the last wish, one he didn't mean to make, Tooru bites his tongue but knows he's already sought after it. He opens his eyes out of the prayer, realizes he might be taking too much time up at the shrine, and forces himself to the side. He finds his family scattered around the temple grounds; his mother is chatting with an old friend, another woman under a tree, his father is on the phone, discussing shop inventory, probably, and his sister's got herself immersed with one of the priests working for the festivities this morning. In no mood to discuss the merits of avoiding _witching hours_ or introducing himself to one of his mother's countless friends, he slinks off towards a high wall of paper lanterns, none of them lit from the light of a pale morning. By the grace of a clouded sun, Tooru basks a bit, careful not to trample on the lantern spines behind him with his own. 

He takes another look out at the people on the grounds, and how places like this always seem to fill to the brim on special occasions. When he thinks back to his sister's words, her notes on places like shrines, where the _veil runs thin and the ghosts come out to play,_ he wonders if he can spot any. At seven, Tooru might've believed in them. At eleven, he'd like to think that some people just slip from his grasp and pretend to be invisible.

Up the path, Tooru makes out such people—or he thinks he has. He knows they're different somehow, but for all the talk of ghosts, the _yūrei_ and their pallid robes, the _onryō_ and the blood on their hands, he errs on the side of believing there might be none at all. Bored, he wonders if it's just a matter of being somewhere unfamiliar, like being at a catering hall and wandering into dinner party that wasn't yours. Anyone would look like a ghost in such circumstances, to feel so out of your element you might as well rise up out of your skin and leave altogether. He thinks of such places where the pressure meets unbearable lightness, the ones he's chatted with Eiko about before—the bus stops under rain, a classroom no one uses, shrines during major holidays, forest clearings and houses not yet moved in—and remembers the one he never, ever talks about. 

When Tooru remembers the amphitheater at Sunrise Garden, the rows of stands and their carnival games, the lights blinking from empty rides, Tooru breathes the winter in deep to cleanse his palette. Still, the thoughts remain, and he's never thought to discard any memory or memento; the stuffed bear from that time still rests on his bed, in the corner by his pillow under his movie posters.

Tooru shakes himself free momentarily, ignoring the lump nested in his throat. Once more, he observes the people around him, the intermingling of everyone who's come to such uncomfortable spaces. Past the snow banks kicking up frost, the obscuring cover, he peers. A grandfather sits by the pavilion alone, feeding the birds who've braved the winter. A girl at the edge of her friend group messes with her kimono, dying to get into the conversation. A couple, starry-eyed and lost in a world past this one, blow steam into the air and pretend it's magic. 

The gods blow on the dunes once more, taunting that _these people are not meant to be seen_. Snow kicks up in a howling whip, but Tooru squints past their insistences to turn away.

Priests welcome people to the Kanda Shrine, bowing at both entrances. Tooru doesn't even remember one being on the west side, and the moment he blinks toward the phantom torii gate _,_ he lets himself forget it for the most part, vision blurred like the broken mirror of a water’s edge. 

Hocus pocus aside, Tooru just goes back to watching, all these people who _don't_ belong and _do_ belong, and realizes, that maybe, it can be both, and that this might be what Eiko's talked about before. The in-between. Not a place for ghosts or other vengeful things, but a bridge between one place and the next. _Welcome to the Twilight Zone,_ he muses to himself in joking, pretending that he isn't on the verge of understanding. 

At the thought, Tooru laughs. He thinks he's read too many of Eiko’s books over the years, or listened to too many of her stories.

"Hajime-kun!"

Tooru perks up at the name, cautious not to raise himself too high or hopeful. Out in the courtyard, the familiar sight of a woman with a coffee cup and a phone to her ear tries calling through the crowd, heels clicking for a boy too elusive to be caught. _Iwaizumi Hajime._ At the name, the one he remembered three years ago, Tooru takes off and makes the lanterns fly up behind him. Ignoring the sound of his mother's calls to settle down, his sister, asking about any paranormal sightings, he brushes past the other temple-goers and checks the spaces between vermillion columns.

Past the sharp gusts of ice, Tooru sees him in glimpses, and Iwaizumi mirrors his gasps in return. The sight of him only lasts a few seconds each time, as if he's tuned into a fuzzy television channel, or an FM station with a weak signal.

"Iwa-chan!" Tooru calls out anyway, birds flying out of their roosts at the echo. A passing temple priest tells him to calm down, but he doesn't. His sister does much of the same, catching him by a held wrist.

"What's wrong, Tooru?" Eiko asks. "You're going to upset the spirits."

Tooru shakes his head, all sorts of frantic. "Iwa-chan! I heard someone call his name! He's _here_ , onee-chan."

"Tooru..." she starts, darting glances around. "I'd be careful about what you chase here. There's a certain amount of respect you should have at the temple, and chasing after _him_ is sure to disturb the balance here."

"I just want to see him, onee-chan," he insists.

"Yes, and I _understand_ that, Tooru...but I have a feeling he's—"

"No!" Tooru knows where this conversation is headed. "Don't start with that," Tooru argues. "No matter what this is, Iwa-chan is Iwa-chan, and I'm going to find him!"

"Tooru!"

Promises made, Tooru runs off, kicking up the fallen snow at his feet.

When Tooru finds a smaller terrace, closed off by the wrap of the temple around it, quiet like he's never heard it, he notices how the snow's begun to fall once more. He doesn't remember the weather forecast calling for it this morning, but he's learned better than to underestimate the things to come, the mysteries on the horizon. He knows this when he wipes the winter haze from his eyes, all clear to see, and finds Iwaizumi Hajime, all still and back turned, but not quite out of reach.

"Iwa-chan—"

But maybe Eiko was right about disturbing the peace. As soon as Tooru steps forward, the snow fights back like a blizzard, gales almost pulling him right off his feet. With a sharp draw of breath, Tooru takes shelter behind one of the temple columns, squeezing his eyes shut. On the other side, the other boy inhales deep like he's been running, too. He's still got his back to Tooru on the other side of the post, facing out at the sudden onset of storm. 

"Iwa-chan?" Tooru shivers out, wincing when he finds the name on his tongue. He almost hopes it isn't him, that he won't turn around, because people lose things all the time, and he had lost Iwaizumi more than three years ago, along with loose change in his pockets and his two front baby teeth and Mikan-chan—so _no_ , it can't be him, it really can't be—

"Oikawa?"

—but of course, of course, it can be no other.

Iwaizumi beckons at Tooru's voice, all half-changed from their growing and gaudy bodies.

Tooru follows the voice to the tune of getting so see Iwaizumi again, but deep down, past he bodily ache to face him, he knows it is not yet time for something full-on. If he's learned anything from the occult, all the things unexplained, it's that some things must happen when they're meant to. 

Still, it wouldn't hurt to imagine. Tooru pictures the one and only Iwaizumi Hajime, face fixed in a frown, taller than him maybe, holding his ground like he’s trying to guard himself from something malignant. But at once, Tooru would like to think he'd soften just like that time, brows knit but not scowling. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the way Iwaizumi leans on the other side of the column, too. In symmetry, the periphery, Tooru feels the way his shoulders lower with his, observes the way Iwaizumi collects snow on the wool of his coat. How welcoming he is by the sound of sighs and the quietest landings.

“Happy new year,” Tooru tells him in trained tones, not really knowing what else to say. He shuffles his feet, presses himself more against the temple column like a crutch, and waits for Iwaizumi to return the greeting. To fill the silence, the gusts howl and screech and rule the skies above, the grounds where they were supposed to find a place to settle.

"So." 

" _So,"_ Tooru repeats back. He grabs at the back of his own head, flitting his gaze about from the sky and then right to the ground, repeating the motions until he finds the will to lift back up.

"I'm not speaking to a ghost, right?" Iwaizumi is the one to ask first this time. Tooru can't quite tell if he's serious or not, but he hears the way Iwaizumi smothers a gruff laugh under the wind. With a grunt, Iwaizumi just heads back into silence after that, and Tooru wonders if this is what it's like to meet an old friend again—or if he can even call him that; like drawing chalk lines, Tooru thinks it might be like keeping right on a certain boundary. Awkwardness rules one side, while reassurance, the other.

Tooru thinks he might like the latter, and that things will burn brighter than before. At the thought, the warmth that someone might call hope, Tooru reminds himself to stay cool, to skim the surface without breaking for full-on sun, and to look forward without going too far down the road. 

“I could ask the same thing about you,” Tooru just retorts right back, scoffs kept as an biting endnote.

To this, Iwaizumi says nothing. Two boys stir in the incoming frost, neither one of them willing to break just yet.

From seven to eleven, Tooru should’ve learned to let bygones be bygones, to understand that there may have been good reasons why Iwaizumi couldn’t be there that day, but he knows he hasn’t grown out of such pettiness yet. He knows he will lilt and laugh and pretend, his arsenals pleasant to the point of bitterness, but only the beautiful kind. Problem is, Tooru knows there are a special breed of people who won’t fall prey to it. While the others might shiver in place, whisper over the matter of a _bad personality,_ Iwaizumi remains, unswayed and simple and true, like he could hold up the whole of Kanda Shrine himself.

“You’re mad at me,” he tells Tooru, like it's a fact, and the latter knows he has been seen through.

Tooru lets his face falter but not fall, biting his lip down when he realizes Iwaizumi can't see him past the column anyway.

“Why would you think that?”

“It’s not hard to tell,” Iwaizumi says, all a matter-of-fact. “Is it because they patched up the hole at the park? I haven’t seen you these past three summers.”

“What?”

“At Sunset Garden,” Iwaizumi continues on.

“You think I’m mad about _that_?” Tooru hasn't been anywhere near the amusement park in the past three years, something he blames commercials, castings, and extra cram school on. Watching one movie a day and following Eiko around hasn't been helpful either, so he knows there isn't emptiness to his excuses. It's not like he was actually _retaliating_ against Iwaizumi in any way, he convinces himself, because that would be _oh so_ childish, and he's above things like _that_ , of course—

Iwaizumi snorts on his side of the post. “So you _are_ mad," he deduces.

Tooru relents any sort of charade, swallowing it down with the lump in his throat. He flicks up a pout at Iwaizumi, tempted to look over. “You never showed up at the bakery that day,” Tooru tells him, past any penchant for made up stories, keeping himself on the periphery of caring. “I waited past closing time that night,” he recounts. 

“What are you talking about?” Iwaizumi asks. “ _I_ waited past closing time at the bakery. _You're_ the one that never showed up. I just thought your mom caught you and sent you home."

“Are you sure you were at the _Velvet Rose_ that night?” Tooru asks back. “On the red bench?”

“It’s _blue_ ,” Iwaizumi tries to correct him. “A blue bench.” 

"Red." 

_"Blue."_

“So how about you just admit that _you_ went to the wrong place that night and we can call it even?” Tooru chimes on, maybe too innocently. “We can forget all of our troubles about this and get some _oden_ in the city. My sister would probably love to tell you about the ghosts she’s seen in Saitama.”

“But I waited that day, too.” Iwaizumi stays  on the subject, shaking his head. “I was there, Oikawa, and I know I didn’t get the place wrong.” 

“Then are you saying that I’ve been mistaken?” Tooru asks, agitated. “What? Like they’re two _Velvet Roses_?” he asks, jokingly. At the pit of his stomach, he feels it churn and churn, full but the emptiest he’s ever felt it; part of him says, _hey, you’re screwing this up, you want to keep him, don’t you—_ because he would, and he’s got the chance do it, but the other part of him, stubborn as stubborn can be, says it’s not worth the sting again. Because, _yeah, you can see him again, but keep your distance and you'll be better for it._

“Whatever,” Iwaizumi says  back to him. “I don’t know what happened back then, but there’s no use getting huffy about it now.”  Tooru glares back ever so slightly, catching a glimpse of that snow-covered shoulder once more.

 _Well, what do you think is the other side of such strange spaces?_ Oikawa’s sister asks once more, back in the pit of Tooru’s memory. He feels all the air leave him in that moment, sharp in epiphany but still unable to trace, like a thief gone in the goddamned night.

“We can get oden this time if you want,” Iwaizumi changes the subject, getting closer, and Tooru feels him dig his hands into his pocket for something before letting them settle.

“Yeah?” Tooru peeks up,  almost seeing him, still cautious.

"I guess."

“If we do, will you take all the daikon away from my bowl? I hate those."

"Whatever," Iwaizumi scoffs back, and Tooru thinks he might like riling him up more than he admits.

"Really?" Tooru holds back laughter with an open mouth— _gotta stay cool!—_ and lets Iwaizumi follow him back onto the main grounds. Under the sudden storm, a mass of people have stated filing out, some by the east, the others by the west, and spots his family is waiting by the former. Tooru waves to Eiko by the torii gate, shouts that he'll be right there, and follows in the same direction. When he feels Iwaizumi straggle behind him, he calls after his friend without turning back.

"Come on, Iwa-chan. I promise I'll forgive you if we get to have oden," Tooru tells him, only half-joking. 

By the western entrance, amongst the faceless and the unfamiliar, Tooru spots the lady with the coffee cup and the cell phone to her ear. By the stone wall, another, older, woman in an amber kimono waits under a thick knit shawl. Next to her, a tall and broad man, bristled and stern like Iwaizumi, waits in a suit and chatters along with the people in his company, never smiling but seemingly in good spirits anyway. 

The storm obscures them once more, flimsy paper dolls in white screen of snow.

Once more, Tooru thinks of the grandfather by the pavilion, a girl standing at the edge of the crowd, the couple blowing hot air, and thinks of all the unreal, all these interim people with their faces obscured. Back at the west, Tooru sees nothing past that particular gate, as if the people passing through are just walking into thin air.

"I can't go with you that way," Iwaizumi proclaims. Silence follows once more. 

"Well, I can't go with you the other way," Tooru proclaims. "I just can't."

Iwaizumi doesn't question this. "I just have a feeling that that gate isn't for me," he says instead, "like I don't belong on the other side of it." 

"Then what do we do about that?" Tooru finds himself asking, even though he could just very well leave him here without another word. One to the east, and one to the west, all without ever having to see each other again—but he can't find the will to hop off the last stone step. Stuck in place, head to cobblestone, he waits for Iwaizumi to leave first, because maybe it'll be better that way, but Iwaizumi remains, too, close enough to stay in his orbit.

"I don't know. We could just meet on the outside, again," Iwaizumi suggests, but Tooru feels his stomach wring out something dry at the idea. "Like at an oden stand, or—"

" _Tooru-kun!_ It's time to go!" Tooru watches his parents leave through the east end, his sister still skirting the edges to speak with a temple priest. He swallows, shouts that he'll be there, but doesn't move an inch.

Behind him, Tooru hears the sound of jingling pocket change and crinkling paper, rough hands in a rushed search. 

"Well?" Iwaizumi asks, with voice smaller than before.

Tooru just shakes his head, because deep down, somewhere, he knows they will not be able to meet. He thinks about the matter of different times and different places, how some people never learn to reconcile the two of them—and how, _god, you really might be a ghost,_ or something else entirely, but how, playing coy aside, he would like to see Iwaizumi again anyway, and definitely, _maybe_ keep him as a friend this time.

As before, with head switching between blessings counted and the ones he'd so earnestly like to have once more, Tooru watches Iwaizumi's feet shuffle down with much of the same open trepidation, feels the mittened hands pressing into his open palm. Iwaizumi closes it at once before climbing back up the steps, still keeping out of Tooru's view.

With a deep breath, he unfurls the surprise when Iwaizumi lets go.

Despite the fleeting touch, two ADMIT ONE stubs remain all glimmering, laminated gold in Tooru's palm.

"I've been thinking." (‘ _For what? Three years?’_ Tooru is tempted to ask). "If you're going to be _annoying_ about meeting again, let's just make this our place to do it," he asserts. Iwaizumi came prepared this time, and Tooru knows, instantly, that he doesn’t mean Kanda Shrine. On the stub, it’s not just any ADMIT ONE, but the VIP kind, granted for _anytime use_ at Sunrise Garden.

“Iwa-chan. How did you even…?” 

“Come to Sunset Garden and find out,” Iwaizumi tells him, ever elusive.

“ _Sunrise,_ ” Tooru finds himself correcting. At once, the storm tears through the temple, sending bits of red paper lantern up into the sky. To Tooru, in that moment, they look like escaping embers, forever lost to the upper atmosphere above.

Iwaizumi does not back down. “There you go, with the differences again. I think I’d know the name of my own—”

_“Tooru-kun!”_

Down by the eastern exit, Tooru's sister calls for him once more, a last call for home and a place without Iwaizumi Hajime. Hearing his sighs, Tooru wonders if that's Iwaizumi's way of softening too, if they've reached some mutual understanding— _yes, we’ve found each other again, but not for good._

“My phone number is on the back of one of the tickets,” Iwaizumi tells him.

"Really?" Tooru smiles at that. “You must really like me, Iwa-chan.”

 _“Tooru-kun! Come on, or we’re leaving without you!”_ Eiko teases.

At the taunt, Iwaizumi scoffs like he’s been hit in the face with a fly. _Indignant_ might be the word for it. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I just think it’s wrong to leave a friend hanging. I don’t care who was at fault for the bakery thing, but I'd rather avoid something like that again, so... _yeah_."

Tooru nods along. "Okay. We can try to make plans for that oden stand in Sendai, then," he tells him.

"We can try." Iwaizumi quiets himself all grave when he says the words, but only ever so slightly. The sound of it sets battles off in Tooru's stomach anyway.

In between them, the winds find a way to kick up and whine, its howl of a crescendo the sure sign to part.  

"So I'll see you later then, Iwa-chan?" Tooru asks, running back to the rest of his family without another word. With tickets in hand, he looks over his shoulder, just once, for answers. Just to get a clearer look.

 

  

 

 

"Hey, Oikawa!"

Tooru perks up, one foot already out the eastern gate.

 

 

 

 

"I'll see you!" Iwaizumi shouts back, loud enough that all of the temple grounds can hear him. "Whenever I can, I'll definitely see you!" In retaliation, and just before he can see Iwaizumi's smile, the snow picks up again, and the universe's wind blows up a heavy white. 

And all at once, Tooru loses his place with Iwaizumi for the second time, but he braces himself and swallows down to count every new blessing.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

When Tooru comes back to his home in Miyagi, travel-worn and ready to fall asleep, Eiko comes in with good news, an envelope waving in her hands.

In a rather fortunate turn of events, Tooru's landed himself a minor role as _the second little brother_ in an upcoming drama series filming in Sendai, with production beginning in the spring he's supposed to start middle school. At the news, Tooru just smiles wearily, knowing this will hit him harder in the morning, but for now he's got other things on his mind, like his two VIP tickets to Sunrise Garden, the wishes he made at Kanda Shrine, and the brush of snow on Iwaizumi's shoulders. In a haze, he just peeks up at Eiko through the letter, stomach still in unbearable knots, and lets her know that something is amiss.

"What's wrong?" she asks with a sigh, taking the letter back with a pinch of her fingers. "I thought you'd jump out of bed at the news." 

Tooru shrugs. "Just thinking about things." 

"Does it have to do with the kid you were talking with at the shrine?" Eiko asks, always spot on. 

Tooru nods.

"Was it the same boy that stood you up at the bakery?" 

With a frown, Tooru can't deny it. Eiko bats her eyelashes in the classic Oikawa family fashion, proud of her abundance of sisterly instinct. 

"He says that he went that day, though," Tooru continues. "It's weird. Like, he calls Sunrise Garden _sunset_ and insists the bench was blue, not red, and we're always..." Tooru can't seem to find the words for it, thinking of the north end and the south end, east and west or whatever the direction. " _Opposites_ ," he concludes, knowing that it's more than that, somehow, but everything he's trying to describe. Eiko nods along, never caught up in misunderstanding. She sets herself down on the foot of Tooru’s bed and hums something soft, always a habit the both of them take when they’re thinking about things or fiddling with something mindlessly.

“Interesting,” she remarks. “Perhaps he’s not of this world.” 

“I don’t think this is the time for your _occult club_ stuff, onee-chan—”

“I’m _serious_ , though,” Eiko tells him. “It’s like that episode we saw of _The Twilight Zone—_ ” 

“ _Please_ , no more of that,” Tooru interrupts her.

“Oh, just let me finish! It’s like that episode of _The Twilight Zone._ The one where they explain that other dimensions exist? You know, ones we’ll never be able to see?” Eiko pads her chin with the folded letter, trying to remember. “What was the episode again? _Little Girl Lost?_ Well, what I’m trying to say is, your friend, oh, what was his name?”

Tooru tells her _Iwa-chan._  

“Well, your friend _Iwa-chan_ might be from such a place.”

Tooru draws his knees back up to his chest, bringing his blankets with him. “I kind of remember that episode, though. The _other_ place was all mixed up, and _weird_ , and nothing like here. When Iwa-chan talks about home, he’s talking about Japan, too. We met at Kanda Shrine, after all. And Sunrise Garden. Tokyo and Sendai.”

Eiko wags her finger. “You haven’t been listening to me all these years, have you?” 

Tooru flutters his own eyelashes back at her. “Well sometimes hearing your voice makes good _white noise,_ ” he tells her cheekily, eyebrows raised.

“ _Regardless,_ and maybe you’re still too young to understand,” she continues on, putting on her best _college upperclassman_ facade, “different dimensions don’t have to be all that different in the first place. I’ve done my readings on it—I mean, just imagine a whole other universe, Tooru, where almost everything could be the same. A house, the same as this, the way the rain falls in June. A _Velvet Rose,_ one for each dimension,” she muses all dreamlike, like she’s talking to one of her friends about a brand new spirit board she bought off a shaman.

Tooru understands at once. He doesn't like the possibility of it. “You’ve got to be kidding me," he insists, because no way, no way, no way. 

Eiko shakes her head. “Just think about it. A whole other universe, where pretty much everything is the same except for a few thing key things—a blue bench instead of _red,_ _Sunset_ Garden instead of Sunrise. _Iwa-chan_ is from such a place. Really, it all makes perfect sense, Tooru.” 

“Yeah, except it _doesn’t_ ,” Tooru insists. And to prove it, he asks for Eiko’s cell phone. He digs out one of the tickets to Sunrise Garden out from his top bedside drawer, punching the number into the touch screen and letting it ring. He waits for it, ready to prove Eiko wrong, but he watches her grow into something smug when he reaches a message from the operator: _Sorry, but you have reached a number that has been disconnected. Please hang up and try again._ This is what he does, three more times to be precise, attempting a fourth until his sister takes the phone away altogether.

“It can’t be,” Tooru tells her, still in disbelief.

Eiko lifts herself up from Tooru’s bed. “One day, I’ll make a believer out of you,” she announces, frowning at the recent lack of Tooru's alien posters. “I did it with the extraterrestrials, and I can certainly do the same with this, too.”

“But say if it were true,” Tooru surmises, just as she’s about to walk out of his room, “then are you saying there's no point in trying to find him?”

“Hm,” Eiko says, leaning her head on the door. “I think you should listen to your onee-chan a little better, next time.”

“What do you mean by that?” Tooru asks.

“It’s all a matter of _liminal space._ Find him there,” she explains, before twirling to close the door behind her, tapping at the side of her head, leaving Tooru the rest of the night to think about such things.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

By the time spring arrives, Oikawa Tooru has already filmed for two episodes of the romantic dramedy, _Opposites Attract,_ as younger brother number two, a salient departure from his most memorable roles such as _loving cat owner’s son_ and _crying toddler in the backseat._ For what local critics have penned as a _heartwarming_ portrayal, a performance both witty and graceful for the likes of an eleven-year old, this most recent acting job has given Tooru a leg up concerning his time at Kitagawa Daiichi, a school for which he's been penned  _a boy wonder._

 _That kid’s in movies and stuff,_ they all say now, instead of, _wow, I saw that kid cry on national television._ Tooru’s heard a ton of weird things about puberty, about bodies changing and voices deepening, but he can’t complain about the grace of maturity, and how kids might care about things other than cartoons and rangers fighting giant monsters. He laughs behind the door to himself when a couple of girls call him by name in the hall, _Tooru-kun’s_ and _Oikawa-kun’s_ all mixed in, with urges to come see the _phantom lights_ of Sunrise Garden with them tonight, but he doesn't hate the attention; with something skittish, he thinks it might be easier here, maybe, if people liked him more often than not. Let them see the daylight in him, all bright and splendid, but only at arm’s length, like a wrist grazing sun from an open window.

With a small fist, he thuds it against his chest and sighs out to compose himself, classroom duties finished and sweat barely broken. Tooru doesn’t have to go in for filming this afternoon, but he thinks it’s time for him to join an after-school club, just something to pass the time between shooting days. The rest of Kitagawa Daiichi’s been expecting it, too: he’s already heard pitches from the mahjong society and the photography club, both perfectly fine establishments within the school’s walls, but he finds no interest in any of it, extensively. He also thinks about the things he _could_ be allocating his time to instead, like learning his lines better or practicing his smiles in the mirror, jogging so that he might grow taller, finding empty spaces and meeting Iwaizumi in the middle.

“ _Iwa-chan, Iwa-chan, Iwa-chan,”_ he muses, all soft, all singsung, just because no one can hear him, see him at the moment. He admires the solitude at times. It lets him breathe, even huddle into himself if he needs it.

Yanking a window open, Tooru sets himself on the sill, arms outstretched, and thinks about the opening day at Sunrise Garden. It’s still a little ways off, about a month and and half’s time, but it’s enough to warrant tremors across the small of his back. Already antsy, he’s taken his sister’s advice and checked for potential _liminal spaces:_ the bus stop no one ever seems to take, the highest point of the mountain pass between towns, the last car on the train to Sendai—he never finds anything but an emptiness waiting to be filled, the feeling that something should be there, but isn’t, and knows it amounts to nothing if he can’t find Iwaizumi Hajime in any of them.

Tooru breathes out, air still the tiniest bit visible. Come to think of it, this classroom could count for such space today, with how alone it feels right now. Light glints in just like that morning at the amusement park, last of the day retreating behind the trees and high buildings, while the curtains fly up like a school’s notorious ghost. Relaxed, Tooru tries counting the floating dust particles in the remaining sun, too rested to move.

“Are you going to meet me here today, Iwa-chan?” Tooru ponders, fingers tapping along his chin. Briefly, he wonders if he’s gotten any taller since he’s last seen him, or if he’s started to take notice of _girls_ like all the other boys in his class. Caught in a dream, he doesn’t even hear the door slide shut behind him, or the footfalls of someone stepping in.

“No, but I am.”

Tooru nearly falls out of his seat from the surprise. He nearly mouths _Iwa-chan_ in his confusion, all ready to see him again, but he’s only met with disappointment with a stranger. Tooru inspects him, like all the others; he might have dark hair like Iwaizumi too, but it’s all wavy, with expressions glazed, all heavy lidded, his body encased in a too-tall frame. He doesn’t have that same sharpness like Iwaizumi, not even half of it; in fact, the way he hangs around reminds Tooru of one giant drawl, instead, or a breeze from an unexplained draft.

"I'm sorry, I just _had_ to try that once," the stranger says.

“Can I help you with something?” Tooru asks with a polite smile, still unnerved. 

“Hm...yeah,” the other boy says, revealing the paperwork from behind his back. “You’re Oikawa Tooru right?” 

“I am.” Tooru knows the drill whenever someone asks him that, matting his hair back to achieve his maximum graces. He’s never been asked for an autograph before, but he’s always figured that that day would come—

“Well, I have some questions for you,” he starts, getting right to the point and perusing the paperwork he’s got in his hands. “Your sister’s Oikawa Eiko, right? A teacher told me she founded the paranormal club here, or something…”

“It was the _occult_ club, actually, and yeah. That was her,” Tooru tells him with a roll of his eyes. “Why? Are you trying to recruit me?”

The boy nods, not bothering to put up a front. “Yeah, I guess.” He makes sure no one else is around, pulling up a chair next to Tooru and getting real close. Tooru recoils a bit at this, scowls more apparent than a _golden boy_ should carry around, but the other boy laughs at it and backs off, hands raised.

"Listen, Oikawa-san—"

"Just Oikawa's fine," Tooru corrects him.

"Okay, _Oikawa_ , I'm gonna be honest with you.” The boy glances around once more, shaking his head in small bobbles. “I don’t really care who you are, and I don’t mean that in a mean way. It’s cool that you’re on TV—I think I even remember you from a cat food commercial or something—but I imagine that your schedule is really _packed_ , right? As in, you don’t have a ton of time for clubs.”

Tooru nods along. “I guess not.”

“So you must be looking for something really _low maintenance._ ” 

“Sure,” Tooru answers.

“And what’s more low maintenance than talking to _kokkuri-san_ on a spirit board all afternoon?” 

"Book club."

"See, but even _that_ reeks of effort, though."

At once, Tooru understands his drift. “So...what you want is to join a club...without really having to join a club.” 

“Precisely,” he answers “Less effort for me, without all the _stigma_ of going home early.” 

“But you do realize that my _sister_ founded that club, right? It’d be rude to let you have it unless you really wanted to do something with it,” Tooru lilts, in complete honesty. “Besides, with me in it, I’m sure you’d get lots of members. Wouldn’t that be just _more_ work for you?”

“Not if we say we specialize in _haunted_ expeditions. Plus, this school’s obsessed with athletics, especially their volleyball club of theirs, and I doubt anyone would want to mess with all that spooky stuff, anyway.”

“Occult club is more than just ghosts, um,” Tooru points at the boy's nose with a twirled index finger, still not knowing his name. 

“Matsukawa Issei,” he introduces himself finally.

“Listen Matsu— _Mattsun,_ ” Tooru states, with the nickname made on the fly. “There’s other things to it, like _aliens_ and um, western horoscopes. _Bigfoot_. Alternate dimensions. If you’re going to properly run a club, you have to include that stuff, too.” 

“ _You’re_ certainly getting fired up about this, Oikawa,” Matsukawa says. “Consider yourself a believer?"

Tooru's still not sure about that. He shrugs, because he doesn't know how else to answer.

"Tell me something else, then. How would you run this club? No field trips? Would you forbid me from the _Ju-on_ house?”

Tooru thinks about this for a moment, thinks about the train cars and bus stops, all the other places he could explore if only he had a friend, or at least an _acquaintance_ to come along with him. On the matter of friends, he thinks back to the two VIP tickets in his bed stand drawer, how odd that Iwaizumi didn’t want to keep the other (but still said they’d meet _anyway_ ) and how it’d be better than going at this alone. 

“No, the field trips are fine,” Tooru tells Matsukawa. “But it’s really more than just going to haunted houses.” 

Matsukawa listens, surprisingly interested. “Yeah? Explain.”

Tooru gets up from his seat, watches the room descend further into dusk, that strange in-between surrounding day and night, and finds his gaze out at the emerging pink sky. Again, he wonders where Iwaizumi his, and how he’s doing, the people he’s meeting, the friends he’s making. Oh how he'd like to be one of them. He thinks of New Years again, the wish slipping off his tongue in unsaid syllables, and swallows them back for something clever.

_To see him again._

The wind whips up a storm, but the horizon keeps clear for the roads ahead.

 _Go see him again._  

Tooru clears his throat, still on the precipice of believing the impossible.

“Have you ever heard of liminal space, Matsuun?”

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

For the next couple of weeks following the Kitagawa Daiichi  _Occult Club_ ’s reinstatement, Matsukawa Issei follows Tooru all over the likes of Miyagi, meeting him after class and filming sessions to explore the prefecture’s oddest spiritual hotspots. Eiko had given him a whole list of the spaces she could never explore herself before, naming all the abandoned houses and hidden alleyways, the wells and the tiny town temples; her recommendations had become a treasure map of sorts, helping the occult club bring back things like out-of-tune music boxes and old keys, a left-behind  _yukata_  robe and a cracked vase, and even an unfinished manuscript about two star-crossed time travellers (which Tooru didn’t think was very good). Sometimes they even sneak into other schools, determined to skulk and sift through their empty classrooms, their secrets. When they have time, the paths of nearby cemeteries come right after.

“You really think we’d find him  _here_?” Matsukawa asks him one day, when they’re treading carefully along the hills, their voices kept to solemn whispers. Overhead, the moon beams for a shot with the sky, and past the cliffs, Tooru swears he can make out a horizon of light from Sunrise Garden.

Tooru shrugs and keeps going, eyes kept on the next town over. “Maybe,” he answers him. "Cemeteries are plenty  _odd_."

“I mean, can’t you wait until opening day at  _Sunrise_?” Matsukawa asks back. “Why do you feel the need to go the extra mile?”

Tooru flicks his gaze back at Matsukawa, petulant. “Because if I can see him sooner, the more I can brag about my time on  _Opposites Attract_ and everything else he’s missed out on,” he answers, with smiles pleasant. “And believe me, he’s certainly missed a lot.” Tooru scoffs at this, but makes sure not to open his mouth too wide; this is both a provision of pride and to ward off any potentially jealous spirits.

At this, Matsukawa comes close to seeing past his feints. He squints a bit, but he says nothing more like usual, because some people would rather leave things alone. Tooru thinks he likes that about Matsukawa Issei, because it’s waste of air to explain when something’s wrong (because,  _god,_ how he hates that question sometimes, ‘ _what’s wrong?’_ since he knows it just means having to unbury his burdens, stopping to explain himself), but his new friend never does any of the sort. They drift along, almost-believer and non-believer of the supernatural, and Tooru takes the casual hollowness in like a breeze.

_So if you need to cry the next time we hang out, don't worry about holding it in._

Iwaizumi's face flashes through his head again, wrinkled in the forehead, surely insisting.  _Always insisting._ With a tiny laugh, Tooru shakes his head to himself, taking one last look at the town ahead, and parts ways with Matsukawa at the bottom of the hill.

Not fearing any lingering ghosts, Tooru usually comes home long after night has taken its daily shift, dinner saved under a layer of plastic wrap and everyone else half-asleep by the television in the den. On this particular evening, Eiko is dozing under a kotatsu they really should've put away by now, content anyway. Her little brother lingers, thinks about switching the TV off for her altogether, but sticks around for the last of the  _news at eleven_ broadcast. The lights of a Ferris Wheel blink on and off on the screen, headline under reading,  _GHOSTS AT SUNRISE GARDEN._

 _“...And the mystery of this amusement park's phantom lights will remain to boggle us all."_ Tooru shuts the television off after that, shifts the blankets for his sister to get under, and sits at the table to have his dinner.

"You must really miss me, Iwa-chan," Tooru teases a quiet house, like he might be just across the wall.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"What are your plans for your next break, Oikawa-san?" a classmate asks him one day over a spirit board session, in the midst of unwrapped bakery breads and juice boxes from courtyard vending machines. Tooru hums out his uncertainties, head full of things like independent movie auditions and the upcoming  _Opposites Attract_ summer special, shaved ice by the dozens and maybe a trip to his grandmother's house in Nagano, but in all honesty, he's only sure of one thing.

"Mm,  _well..._ " 

Matsukawa just rolls his eyes because he knows. Tooru rises up in his seat and puts down his translated biography on Marlon Brando altogether, tracing invisible lines in the stifled air instead. He pretends he's designing mile-high roller coasters, riding them to the very top, holding his breath for the inevitable drop below.

"Sunrise Garden," Tooru finally admits out the window. He tries too hard to pretend he isn't absolutely gushing about it.

"Do you really like amusement parks that much, Oikawa-san?"

"No, not particularly," he muses, and glances are exchanged around the room.

"I mean honestly, you could probably do a lot better than that place, anyway. It doesn't have the allure of like,  _Disney_ , or the bigger parks in Tokyo," one of the other boys say. "It's kind of  _old_ , don't you think? It gives off a really creepy vibe, and with all the lights going off at night, I wouldn't even consider going anymore."

Tooru stifles a frown, right on the edge of miffed. Matsukawa kicks him under the desk.

"Nothing wrong with a little tradition," Matsukawa says for him, "you can't beat its charm."

" _Charm._ Of course someone in the occult club would call it  _that,_ " one of their detractors say. "I'm just saying, if Sunrise Garden doesn't step up its game in the future, they're not going to last long." He just shrugs after that, watching Matsukawa prepare the spirit board for  _kokkuri-san._

Tooru feels his stomach churn in loops. "Whatever," he sighs out, drawing the red torii gate with a marker on the top of the page. "Let's just play like we said we would." He looks up, stares at the potential occult members in their midst, but knows they won't last anyway. When Matsukawa merely takes a ten yen coin out of his pocket, two of the guys turn so pallid that they might as well be ghosts themselves. Turning the coin over to Tooru, he inspects it with the rub of pinched fingers, holds it up for everyone to see, and lets Matsukawa scold him for the excessive theatrics. 

"We need three fingers to guide the coin on the paper," Tooru explains, placing it smack dab in the middle of the page, "and then I'll call on  _kokkuri-san_ to answer whatever questions we might have." 

Tooru places his finger on first, followed by Matsukawa and one of the braver prospective members.

With a grin, pleasant enough for any supernatural being to say  _hello,_ Tooru breathes in and starts with a greeting: "Kokkuri-san, kokkuri-san, if you're here, please move this coin!" 

From there, the rest of the afternoon devolves into an otherworldly Q and A session, devoted to all the things middle schoolers might ask, and Tooru lets the spirits guide them through the rest of the afternoon.

 _Does Kumiko-chan in class two like me?_ (No.)

 _How many tournaments will the girl's basketball team win?_ (Two.)

 _Will I get a boyfriend this year?_ (Yes.)

 _Kokkuri-san, will when will I die—_ ("Nope, not that," Matsukawa quickly changes the subject away from the question, claiming that he will not be responsible for any supernatural accidents tonight.)

 _Kokkuri-san, will Oikawa Tooru become Japan's next great actor?_ (The answer to this one was a little more abstract:  _good luck, and work hard,_  which is what everyone tells Tooru, anyway. He chides kokkuri-san for being stingy, before taking it back with a laughing,  _"just kidding."_ )

And when everyone's satisfied with their answers, the prospective members leave in time for the sun to set, leaving just Matsukawa and Tooru to clean the rest of the classroom themselves. When Matsukawa begins to push the desks back, grumbling at the spooky way classrooms feel after class, Tooru just stays at his desk, spirit board still staring him in the face.

"Go home first," Tooru tells Matsukawa, smiles all pleasant, hands perched under his chin. "I still have some questions to ask."

"Don't you have filming tonight?" he asks back.

Tooru shakes his head. "Oh, not tonight. They're still trying to decide where to take the  _lovebirds_ on their first date next episode...the aquarium? A coffee shop? The writers all have their heads in the clouds."

"They're not the only ones." Matsukawa gives Tooru a funny look, at least three different shades of skeptical, from lowered eyes to a wriggling nose, but doesn't fight him on staying. He never really does.

"You know," he suggests instead, "you can try all you want, but you said it yourself: you need two people for  _kokkuri-san_ , don't you?"

Tooru nods. "I know." 

"Then why try? You're just going to get the answers you want to hear," Matsukawa claims, "moving the board yourself." 

"Words of a non-believer," Tooru teases. "I would never do such a thing." 

"Whatever you say," Matsukawa tells him right back with a roll of his eyes, not bothering to deny anything. "Just make sure to put the desks back. Sensei yelled at us last time for keeping them crooked."

Tooru nods, and Matsukawa leaves for the day without another word. He gets up when he knows he's alone, basking in the hollowness of an empty classroom at dusk; the light comes in all sorts of peach and pink, like the skin of a flushed sky, and the sight of it calms Tooru enough to get started. So, done with pacing, he sets himself down in front of the ten yen coin to speak to spirits, only feeling partially ridiculous about his endeavors.

"Hey kokkuri-san, are you still here?" Tooru asks the board, finger barely grazing the metal's surface. When the coin shifts to a resounding  _yes,_ he takes a deep breath, ignores the stories about playing alone—and man, would Eiko be upset to hear that he was—to keep playing.

"Kokkuri-san, can you tell me something?" he asks once more, and the coin stays on the  _yes._

_Deep breath. Stop biting your lip._

_Go on._

"Will I get to see Iwa-chan soon?" 

Kokkuri-san does not move.  _Yes_ comes by the lack of motion, and Tooru takes that as good news. Trying not to get ahead of himself, he breathes in deep and blinks away the sun in his eyes.

"When?"

The board does not answer this.

"Okay, I guess you can't answer everything, huh?" Tooru asks kokkuri-san. It slides over to a clear  _no,_ and he wonders if the occult club has annoyed the spirit to no end this afternoon. He bows his head modestly, whispering a sorry in observance, and the coin moves once more to spell out the words:  _it's okay._ Just the tiniest amount of creeped out, he forges on anyway, determined to get answers.

"For the times I get to see him again, will they be good ones, kokkuri-san?" Tooru inquires next. The coin moves to spell out new words on the board, a slow a scratchy drag to the following— _sometimes_ , the spirit answers, vague as vague can possibly be.

He keeps going, anyway, letting the sliver of sun sink further and further into the ground, questions louder and less discreet for the promise of an emerging night and the ghosts who'll find solace by evening.

 _Will we ever fight?_ (Yes, with  _of course_ added in.)

 _Will we ever get to celebrate birthdays together?_ (Not all.)

 _Why does he want to meet at Sunrise Garden?_ (Ask him yourself.)

Tooru exhausts himself, asking whatever he can think of, and kokkuri-san gives whatever they can. He knows that with every inane question like  _how is he doing in school,_ or  _is he getting along with everyone in his class,_ that he's just stalling for the answers he's afraid of.

Matsukawa once called him the king of diversion, and the girls in his class all ask,  _"Oikawa-san, what are you really thinking in that head of yours?"_  

 _"Nothing."_  

_"Surely you must be worried about something. Everyone does."_

_"Not me, I haven't a care in the world."_  

_Does he look for me too, kokkuri-san?_

The board stills, the wind whirls, the sun continues to set.

When the coin shifts to make an answer, Tooru feels his entire body freeze.

(Yes, but he'll never admit it.)

Tooru leans over the desk, heat rising strangely in his face, but he nods, tells himself this could be true, that he'll  _will_  it so, and that they might get to be together—somehow, in  _any_ capacity one day—

"Kokkuri-san! Do you really mean it, kokkuri-san?"

—but this is the mistake he makes, getting too eager, too stubborn to consider the world and the wild they've come from. 

"So we'll...get to be together one day, right?" Tooru asks, rises up from his seat, unable to reel back the gaping beam on his face. He lets it rise and rise until it aches, feels the way the static clings down the middle of his back, but feels it jab at him when he doesn't get an answer. Tooru just watches the coin shift to nothingness, the white space between any  _yes_ or  _no_ or any other character in between, and lie in wait for the next question.

Tooru tries asking again. He receives nothing in return.

"Kokkuri-san?"

Nothing.

"Kokkuri-san, are you still there?"

The coin shifts to a  _yes_ , ever hesitant. 

"Kokkuri-san, is something going to keep us apart?" Tooru asks, not wanting to, knowing how much it would knock the wind out of him. He gulps, watches the coin and his finger travel to make the words.

 _Sorry,_ it spells, and Tooru knows, somehow, that the spirit is being sincere.

"Kokkuri-san?"

(I'm here, Tooru-kun.)

"Does Iwa-chan really live in a different dimension from me?"

Tooru sits back down, eyes glued to the board, letting the spirits take their time. On the horizon, the last of the sun leaves for the day, a  _goodbye_  until tomorrow.

 

 

(He does.)

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

But in these proposed spaces, where children are apt to play with  _kokkuri-san_ too, one boy does no such thing. Scribbling in a book at the foot of the amphitheater stage one late afternoon, Iwaizumi Hajime stares up at the rest of Sunset Garden, at all its classic facades and chipping paint, and decides that he'd like to make it better. He's even got a plan this time, past sneaking in to switch the carnival lights on at night and running from security guards in their golf carts. 

"I've never seen you take so much interest in the park, Hajime. What's on your mind?"

With ambitions held high, Iwaizumi gets on his feet, squinting past the last peek of the day's sun. He clears his throat and calls out to his father, the entirety of the park, and the rest of the universe ahead.

"To improve Sunset Garden, I think we should revive the summer plays we used to hold here, in the amphitheater. Talent is everywhere, and I want to show you what you're missing."

Always kind, always pondering, Iwaizumi's father just shows him a smile, loosens his tie, and listens to what his son has to say.

"Is that so?" he asks. "Do you have anyone in mind? To make this place better?" 

To this, Iwaizumi just nods and closes his notebook.

"I do," he says, like he's never been surer of anything else in his entire life.

 

 

(Because if they are to meet again—Iwaizumi to Oikawa, Hajime to Tooru—with no other place to their name, he knows that will mean making the rest of the world beckon to them.)  

 

 


	3. houses

 

 

The next time Tooru is at Sunrise Garden, it isn't to sneak in, or partake in opening day. It is a Saturday night on the precipice of full-blown spring, and he's sitting in a trailer for an upcoming episode for _Opposites Attract,_ picking from a bento box his mother packed him and pretending to care about the script in his hands. He doesn't have many lines this time around (in fact, he's only been tasked with what the directors called _a true look of victory,_ all for when he's caught his brother on a secret date at the park), so he's been told to sit tight and wait for his time to film.

Innocently, Tooru peers up from his dinner, watches the way the tiny production assistant paces back and forth in the tiny box of his trailer, and strikes a tiny _hallelujah_ when he goes outside to fume further over his walkie talkie. Ever vigilant, it takes less than Tooru a second to set down his meal, straighten his shirt collar, and run out of the trailer and past the spotlights, the cameras that watch him. He has to find Iwaizumi, let him know about all the things that mean to separate them, how he'd like to be friends anyway— 

"Oikawa-kun!" The production assistant tries calling after him. "Stay in the trailer! Apparently someone's snuck into the park and it's not safe being out—"

"I'll be okay!" Tooru shouts back, already too far to be caught. Feet carrying him up the main cobblestone path, he stops when he thinks he's completely out of sight, nothing but the blue haze of an-almost dark to guide him. Already drawn, Tooru peers towards the north end of the park and pictures Iwaizumi waiting at the other side, sleeves rolled up and shoes all scuffed. Back down the path, voices call for Tooru to come back to reality, to stop running so far ahead.

 _Do you really think you'll get to keep him this time?_ doubt calls, resounding.

But the thing is, Tooru's not sure how to stop. It's never been in him to give up anything, even in the face of doubt and the people telling him _there's_   _no way in hell_. So Tooru keeps going, despite the chase behind him, the darkness up ahead, because _I'm going to see Iwa-chan. I'm going to see him and he's gonna be sorry for being away for so long._ He looks at doubt in the face, recognizes it better than anyone else, and abandons it once more with kokkuri-san and the other fates. 

"Iwa-chan!"

Tooru hits a loose cobblestone on the road and ends up tripping on his face. From the ground, he stares up at the looming silhouettes, the shadows of upcoming attractions and towering rides, and searches for any sort of signal that Iwaizumi's even here tonight. When they don't offer any sort of light, he feels his jaw fold into a deep grimace.

Doubt rises back up, because it always does, and Tooru reluctantly opens the door to welcome the worst sort of old friend. 

"Iwa-chan," he calls, quieter. He might have swallowed gravel down, from the way it gnashes on his teeth.

When Tooru begins to feel his chest sink by the worst amounts, a line of light opens itself up to lead the way. Overhead, hung from stand to empty stand, coiled around shop banisters and bare flagpoles, a single strand of yellowed string lights blink awake, winding and never ending like a river's view at an Obon Festival. Picking himself up from the gravel, tiny prayers made, blessings tentatively counted, Tooru wobbles onto his feet and follows it through the dark, further into the depths of Sunrise Garden.

"Iwa-chan!" Tooru calls, past concession stands and tea cup spinners, the looping roller coaster tracks and endless gift shops. "Iwa-chan, I know you're here!" 

" _Shh_!"

"Iwa-chan!" Tooru calls once more.

"Why do you have to be so _loud_?" 

Tooru turns around, letting out a tiny scoff. "Look who's talking," he shouts back, somewhat offended, but hardly able to hold back his excitement. "Iwa-chan, where are you?"

He doesn't have the time to ask further when he feels someone yank him away from the main road and right behind the game stands. Hands scrunched together, knowing the sensation all too well, Tooru doesn't even have to look up to know it's _him_. Hell, he's not even sure he _wants_ to look up—for all the smiles he's learned to feign, the ones he's stifled for a scene's sake, sometimes he finds it hard to let the honest ones stay on his mouth.

"Just look at you," Iwaizumi calls out to him, clicking his tongue. "You're a mess."

Tooru only manages to hide a part of it away before Iwaizumi tips his face up for him, thumb skirting the edges of what stings like a scrape. Tooru winces at the touch, but not because it hurts, particularly; he just lets the heat bubble in his chest, tells himself this is all just the result of running too fast and too hard, and settles down with a shaky exhale. He even finds the will to laugh at the end of it, all in disbelief and more candor than he's willing to admit himself to. At this, Iwaizumi just shakes his head and flicks his finger up to jab at Tooru's cheek.

"Iwa-chan, you found me," Tooru tells him, but Iwaizumi doesn't stop to humor him. Tugging his hand forward, he just leads Tooru out from behind the stands, up the secret paths past the _personnel only_ signs, and just grumbles the entire time on their walk. Again, Tooru ends up a couple of steps behind him, and he just takes that as an opportunity to beam without abandon. Iwaizumi's grown even more, shoulders more filled out than just those couple of months ago, taller but not more than Tooru.

"See, I _hate_ it when people come to Sunset Garden at night, because some of you have _no_ respect for the park whatsoever, and that means a bigger cleanup in the morning..." 

Iwaizumi trails off—and, well, _literally_ comes off the trail—when he reaches what looks like a cabin, a tiny wooden shed hidden amongst the planted lilac trees. Tooru watches him take out a charm bracelet worth of keys, flip to the right one, and unlock it for the both of them, hopping up to get the light on overhead. Resting on a neatly-made cot is a first-aid kit, along with other amenities like toothpaste, a few washcloths, and a couple of notepads with a handful of matching black pens.

Iwaizumi motions for Tooru to sit down on the cot. "The gash isn't bleeding anymore, but I'm not sending you back with _that_ open on your face," he insists, unlatching the box. "I mean, the rest of your _film crew_ or whatever already thinks I'm some kind of madman, and I don't need them thinking I've tried to murder the _next great child actor Oikawa Tooru..._ "

When Iwaizumi tries sticking a bandage—the fun kind, all glow in the dark and patterned with stars—on Tooru's face, the latter can't help but tune out and examine the bunker around him. It's small, just a tad bigger than a walk-in-closet, but it might as well be a whole new world to Tooru: he makes out the green coil of string lights again, wrapped around the tops of four wood-lined walls, the tiny shelf on the wall, with stacked manuals and brochures from years past, along with a small radio resting against a bookend. On the window sill, barely enough to see through, Iwaizumi's let a potted _something_ (some kind of purple flower? Lavender, maybe? A fern?) take shelter on the ledge. Pinned against the walls, posters hang and show off the world's manmade attractions. In a guest's reverence, Tooru says a quiet hello to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Unisphere in New York City, to all the Ferris wheel postcards and the dusty family Polaroids lined on the walls.

"Iwa-chan, what is this place?" Tooru asks with wonder, when Iwaizumi pats the band-aid down to seal it for good. "Do you live here?"

"What?"

" _Do you live here?"_ Tooru repeats himself.

"Did you just _ask_ if I live in an _amusement park_?" Iwaizumi inquires right back, unsheathing more bandages for the scrapes alongside Tooru's arms and knees. 

"What else would I think? You have a bed here and everything!" By accident, Tooru kicks a plastic bag full of convenience store fare on the ground. "You even have _snacks_ ," he adds, like that makes all the world's difference.

Iwaizumi shrugs. "It's just my clubhouse. I come here when I want to be alone," he says, all a matter-of-fact, but he's found a way to avoid Tooru by the eyes, wiping his face by the smudge of his shoulder like the grumpiest house cat the other boy's ever seen.

"So you _do_ sneak in at night, then." Tooru's smile spreads wide, but Iwaizumi just stares up at him once more, incredulous.

"I don't sneak in. I don't know how many times I've tried to tell you, but it's not like that with me. I...it's _different_. I don't have to."

Tooru still doesn't understand. "What is it, then? Did you win some kind of contest?" He lets his eyes grow wide. "Like, one that lets you camp out whenever you want? Spar with the mascots on your free time?"

Iwaizumi's face shrinks, all sour.

"That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard." He proclaims, and he looks like he'd like to stick another band-aid right over Tooru's mouth. The latter conjures up a small and mumbling laugh. 

"When you spend more time with me, you'll learn that I have a very big imagination," Tooru tells him right back, voice wasting away into a sigh. He knows he's testing Iwaizumi in some small way, for motives he can't quite place, or understand. But it's not like he falls prey to it either way; Tooru knows by the way Iwaizumi's face settles into a frown, slow like the change of tide.

Because merely _annoyed_ looks like something sudden, he observes, like the quick twitch of a grimace and a growl to go with it.

 _Grave_ , Tooru decides, is much quieter, and a gentle shift into a very visible strain. 

"If you really don't get it," Iwaizumi asks quietly, "think back to those tickets I left you. How do you think I got them?" 

Tooru thinks for a moment, ponders, once more, why Iwaizumi gave him _two_ of them instead of just that single voucher, because _wouldn't he need one too, to get in, and they must've cost him a fortune so three of those tickets must be out the—oh_. Eyes wide, Tooru doesn't say a single word, but he thinks he might understand.

"My family took down this exhibit at the park a couple of years ago, but they let me keep this part of the property," he explains. "They thought it was a good idea, you know, to groom me for taking it over one day, or something." Iwaizumi peers out the window, and the both of them can hear a bunch of muffled voices come through the walls. "But I've always wanted a clubhouse, so I've been taking my time, turning this first aid station into one."

"You _made_ this?"

Iwaizumi nods. "I like to work with my hands, and I thought I'd practice before I take on bigger projects."

Tooru stands up, does a quick twirl around the little house; he swears it feels bigger somehow, after getting to soak it in a little more.

"And the string lights outside? You did that, too?" Tooru asks.

Iwaizumi shrugs it off, all modest. "You can do a lot with a floor plan and a ladder. It just goes from the north to the...um," he breathes out. "Never mind."

"The south," Tooru finishes for him, with a cheeky little smile. _Where I come from,_ he thinks, _because you were looking for me too,_ but he knows it's too presumptuous to say. 

"Listen, it's not just for _you_ , or anything, because it gets really dark without the lights on, and I'd rather not make a mess of things like you did out there," Iwaizumi explains just a little too well, flicking a finger over a band-aid on Tooru's knee.

Tooru just laughs, so light he could consider it a giggle. "Whatever you say, Iwa-chan. I just have another question."

"What?"

"How about the bigger ones? The kind you can see from the next town over?"

Iwaizumi opens his mouth to say something, but he decides to keep himself shut. When the voices loom closer, muffled outside Iwaizumi's clubhouse, the two of them look at each other and nod just once, a mutual agreement to escape.

"They're going to find us here, Iwa-chan," Tooru insists with a gulp."I mean, if we could just turn off the lights and hide for a little while, we could—"

"You should go," Iwaizumi tells him, all soft, but sudden. "You came here to do a job." He does turn off the lights, leaving them just in the shadows, but he still has the skill to find Tooru and prod him out of the door.

"But Iwa-chan." Separated by a doorway threshold, Tooru stares up, eyes so wide they’re on the verge of stinging. He blinks it away, tries to see Iwaizumi, but the night only allows him to make out the darkness of his friend, black on the darkest cobalt hues.

"You're not getting into any more trouble tonight, Oikawa."

“ _But—_ ”

“We can meet again soon, on opening day.”

In the flash of recent memory, Tooru just thinks back to kokkuri-san and its prophecies, how trouble tends to follow someone close on the paths they want to pursue. He might’ve gotten to see Iwaizumi again, just like the spirits said, but he thinks of everything else that could go wrong, the widening gulf of space and time and _whole dimensions;_ it was kind of the fates to bring them together, to allow two completely different boys this one defined place, but he thinks again of Iwaizumi’s filled-out back, how their throats crack when they try to talk, and wanders into new territory because of it, one of inevitable change (of all the things that could be, might not be, will _never_ be) and wonders, once more, if it’s really worth it to hold on at all. 

“But Iwa-chan.”

“What?”

Tooru swallows back. He knows he’s over-thinking, like usual. He’s always been attracted to the drama of things, whether he means to be in the spotlight or not, and he knows that things can be simpler, if he puts his mind to it. He doesn’t have to think about every possible route, the weedling paths of roots not yet grown. He knows, he knows, he knows—he _knows_ he has to take a deep breath, to stop flying over lands he cannot survey, over places he has not yet reached.

“Iwa-chan,” Tooru starts up again, voice nothing but a tremble, like leaves in a frisky breeze. He wants to tell him at the very least, what _kokkuri-san_ told him yesterday. _We’re not from the same dimension. The park is all we got. You leave by the north, and I go by to the south. Sunrise Garden, Sunset Garden—_

But he doesn’t get the chance, when a few security guards come up behind Tooru and hoist him up by the underarms. Another couple of them apprehend Iwaizumi too, but he only swipes them away and sighs, like he’s been caught like this before. 

“Let me go!” Tooru shouts, trying to wriggle free. One of the guards just speaks into his walkie talkie, says that they’ve _found the actor kid_ by the west end of the park. Another scolds Iwaizumi by the wall of his shed, pointing a flashlight in his face and making him squint.

"Again, kid? _Really_?"

Carried farther and farther away, right back down the lane of lilac trees and away from that little box of a house, Tooru hears them reprimand. _You are going to own this place one day. Act like it. Don't waste your time chasing pests._

Tooru's chest contracts into uncomfortable weight.

"Oikawa!"

But with a shout that rustles the underbrush, the nesting birds on the branches, Iwaizumi shouts back, _I'll see you on opening day,_ past the guards and their _what were you thinking’s,_ past the night. To Tooru.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"So, just how much do you want this?"

"Huh?" Tooru glances up from his paperwork, lets it turn into full-blown eye contact with the casting director, a woman named Tanaka Saeko, and swallows down a stutter. "What do you mean?" he asks her, staring back down at the test shot Polaroids, the sheen of a practiced smile a lot more composed than the shaky one on his face.

"Well, to put this gently, I don't think we're going to choose you for this role," Saeko puts it gently, mouth tactfully hidden behind a steaming cup of tea, "but you are so talented, Oikawa-kun. A _natural_. You'll get more roles in no time, but you have to consider if you really want this. It's long and hard road out there."

Tooru cringes at the word _natural._ He thinks of all the hours at night, huddled in his room, all spent researching the world's greatest actors, all of the world's undeniable classics. Samurai films like _Rashoman_ and _Yojimbo_ became favorites for when he was feeling restless in the early morning, and silent films like Ozu's _A Straightforward Boy_ let him practice the art of practiced expression. Because when he wasn't thinking of ways to see Iwaizumi, or running the occult club at school, he was practicing in the mirror, or watching anything he could get his hands on on the Internet. Names like _Hepburn_ and _Hitchcock_ became just as synonymous as the people in his history books. The scripts have piled up on his desk, right next to neglected homework.

So Tooru could hardly call any of this _natural_. He resents such simplifications. He knows about the merit of hard work, sometimes more than anyone, and _natural_ just isn't the word for it. 

"So Oikawa-kun, what do think?" 

"Of what?"

"Letting the world see you," Saeko answers in something sacred, and Tooru's eyes go wide. That is not something most middle schoolers can readily answer, but he knows what he wants. With every commercial or small part done for the television, Tooru knows that will only lead to bigger and better things. He imagines top billing, or the lead role on a stage. History's longest running evening drama. A variety show in his twilight years. Spotlights and champagne, for every single one of his award wins, from the first to one for _lifetime achievement_. He imagines, then imagines some more, right until the point where he feels his fingers drum violently over the Polaroids, over the feigned faces that'll get him to the very top. That is what he'll let the world see, he thinks, for better or worse, but mostly _better._

Tooru peers back up. "I think I'd like that," he answers modestly, just brimming to say more. Saeko just smiles, like they've come to some sort of mutual understanding. When she slides a business card across the table, Tooru hopes the falter in her grin isn't pity.

"Even though it didn't work out this time, free to audition for any projects I'm helming in the future. Our productions are bigger than just Sendai, or even Tokyo, for that matter," Saeko says. "With us, you'll go everywhere. The whole world will be your home."

Tooru stares down at the card, pictures all the cities, the high plains, the seas. He takes it all to heart, thinks of all the reading he's ever done about haunted castles, bewitched interstate roads; he doesn't want to miss _any_ of it, he'd decided long ago, infamous or not, and this was going to help him realize that. He swallows down when he realizes how close and far all of this might be, how much harder he'd need to work, all the jobs he'd need to book, and wonders about everything else in his life. He thinks about _kokkuri-san_ sessions, homework, rerun nights with Eiko, and occult club on his free days after school. A particular Matsukawa Issei and his breezy lilts. The sunsets in Miyagi (and how nothing else could ever, ever compare), the amusement park and its fickle opening times, Iwaizumi's clubhouse amongst the lilac trees. Iwa-chan himself. 

Tooru sees all of these things like pages from a pop-up book, chapters coming to life and folding back into memory. **1.** His first commercial. **2.** Moving to Miyagi. **3.** Losing Mikan-chan. **4.** Sunrise Garden. Breath held, he thinks of all the places he might go in the future, the pages already flipped over, and wonders when he'll have to go on to the next. Tooru _knows_ he can't stop to think about the oddities of a world's he already read about, but it's what he does, anyway. He dog-ears the parts worth keeping, folds the corner of his favorite pages. Memories replay, all vivid like a child asking his mother to read his favorite story at bedtime. 

 _But Tooru, I've read this to you a million times,_ his mother used to say in the evenings. _You're going to get sick of the story._  

 _Maybe someday,_ Tooru tries to tell himself, back to the park and occult club and Iwa-chan. But deep down, he hopes he can carry it at least some of it with him, flying up those new roads at record pace, worn copy of his history warming his hands. 

"Oikawa-kun?"

"Ah—yeah?" Tooru looks back up, letting a heavy gust come downwind in his stomach; when it settles, all thunderous in its drop, the hollowness reminds him of losing Mikan-chan all over again, like...like something he can't quite explain, all teasing on the tip of his tongue. Tooru might call it _loss_ , but he refuses, because such feelings only come from thinking too much. _Don't be so overzealous,_ his mother used to tell him, when Tooru's eyes glazed over into something stinging, and his head wandered too far down the rabbit hole.

 _But isn't it better to think things through?_ Tooru would ask his mother right back. Because he really might lose all those things soon, faster than he'd expected, like Mikan-chan and the speeding car, or the break of words at the end of a chapter, or how all amusement parks have closing times, _closing days—_

" _Oikawa-kuuuun_ ," Saeko calls out once more, pleasantly annoyed. 

"I'm sorry," Tooru says, trying to clear his head of the end.

"What a daydreamer you are," she remarks, "but that's okay. Just keep going at it, whenever you can, wherever you can," Saeko tells him next, going into her purse for something.

Tooru really snaps out of his haze when she hands over a letter, plain but pressed with the Sunrise Garden's official letterhead.

"Did you hear about this?" she asks him, painted nails rapping along the creases.

"About what?" Tooru asks, feeling his head swell into a rumbling ache.

Saeko smiles. "You might be too young to remember it— _hell_ , even I barely do, but they used to hold a series of summer plays at the amphitheater in the middle of the park," she explains. "Everything from _Kabuki_ to fairy tale adaptations. Even _Waiting for Godot_ that one time, but I heard that was a bummer."

Tooru lights up, but dims himself to stifle any chance of over-excitement. "What does this have to do with me?" 

"Well, some really bright stars once stood on that stage. Pop idols and thespians alike...it's truly one our industry's best known secrets. There's just something about that place that's like magic, you know?" Saeko sighs, and Tooru nods in understanding.

"Magic," Tooru repeats back to her.

Saeko nods along. "And I mean, you might be too _young_ to get a season-long role for yourself right now, but there _is_ something I'd like you to try out for."

"Yeah?" 

" _Yeah_." Saeko grins wide. "It used to be tradition for the park to hold a special production during the summer season, just for one week during break, starring an actor under the age of thirteen. It's usually a very small affair, an adapted version of some shorter work, but... _wow._ There's just nothing like the taste of that stage, and seeing young talent light up because of it."

"Are you telling me to try out for this?" Tooru asks, and he can't help but be grave about it. At this, he thinks about the matter of magic and liminal space once more, how Sunrise Garden always felt more than its wooden facades and strung up lights, and hopes to do that particular world proud.

"I'm just saying that it's an opportunity to look out for," Saeko says, leaving it at that. "But it never hurts to try, doesn't it?" 

Tooru knows that better than anyone. 

"Never," he tells her, more determined than ever.

"That's the spirit."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"I haven't seen you at meetings for the past week," Matsukawa says one day with a curious bouquet of half-flowered weeds in his grip, all loosely bound by an unraveled hair ribbon. Tucking a dandelion behind his ear, he presents it to Tooru in a mocking curtsey before settling down next to him on the bus stop seat, examining the stacks of dialogue on the former's lap and reading some of the lines out loud. In all honesty, Tooru usually hates it when Matsukawa reads over his shoulder like this, but lately he's been so focused on balancing both  _Opposites Attract_ and the upcoming audition for Sunrise Garden that it's hard for him to get even the tiniest bit riled up. He merely waves Matsukawa off, continues mouthing his leading role lines _,_ and lets Matsukawa weave stems into his hair.

"Why the plants?" Tooru asks after he's read the same lines a million times, and he's got a particularly sharp thistle poking him in the cheek. "And stop! You're messing up my hair."

Matsukawa scoffs a bit. "One of your fangirls was picking a bouquet for you in the school greenhouse after our  _ghost hunt_ in there this afternoon." He picks out a few leaves like Tooru's become the centerpiece for an avant garde  _ikebana_ piece, as if any of them know anything about  _flower arrangement._ "I'm baffled," he says, "because  _everyone_ in our grade swears it's haunted, but it's nothing but a bunch of overgrown shrubs and some ugly weeds. But Okada-chan in class four  _swears_ by it.  _Matsukawa-kun, someone's been planting vegetables and taping up glass panes!_ Maybe the school just hired a secret groundskeeper, or something." _  
_

"M-hm," Tooru says back, half-listening. "I suspect poltergeists."

"You  _always_ say poltergeists when you're not paying attention. It's not always going to be poltergeists, Oikawa."

Tooru shrugs. "Well, you never know. And besides, if you didn't believe her, you wouldn't have gone to investigate yourself."

"Hey, I was just in it for the free vegetables," Matsukawa corrects him. "But they're still growing, I think, so I got nothing out of the trip. It doesn't stop the other kids from going into that hellhole, though...if you were around at school more, you'd know that it's become quite a hotspot for after class adventurers." Matsukawa sighs, brushing all the shrubbery out of Tooru's hair. "We should start charging for tours."

Tooru just laughs, bringing the scripts up to his his mouth. "I promise I'll be more into things once this audition's over. We could even charge double with _me_ at the helm, Mattsun."

"Well, I seriously doubt you'll even be around after your audition," Matsukawa insists with a small nod, watching the bus rumbling coming down the road from up the hill. "Because you're the only one I know who'd try so hard for a goddamned one-time child's play. _In an amusement park_. You're going to get it, Oikawa, even if you might as well be a park mascot."

 _You're going to get it._ Tooru likes the sound of that. But in feigned modesty, Tooru squirms on his bench seat and shakes his head. "You just don't understand, Mattsun! It's one of the country's most prestigious shows for up and coming talent, _Cannes_ for kids, an arena for future _academy prize_ winners and Hollywood imports—"

"All right, all right, settle down now," Matsukawa insists when Tooru just bounces out of his seat, too exuberant to keep in one place. "Just listen to me. All I'm saying is that even if you don't get this part, or even the one after that, you're too _annoying_ not to land one eventually. You're gonna be bigger than this place, and when that day comes I'm going to sell your autographs on the internet."

"Excuse me?" Tooru asks, honestly offended.

"That's how you'll make it up to me for skipping occult club meetings," Matsukawa just jokes back, and the two of them sit in an easy silence.

When the bus stops for them to get on, they climb on and watch that certain stretch of town melt away. Taking his seat, Tooru smiles out a cracked window, all hidden behind the palm of his hand, and clutches a rolled-up script for an adaptation of J.M. Barrie's  _Peter Pan_  in the other. Matsukawa's words ring clear, like the sort of truth he'd like to realize sooner rather than later.  _You're going to get it,_ he imagines Matsukawa saying again, and Tooru tells himself the same thing by the mouthing of words.

"It's going to happen," Tooru reassures himself out loud this time, and Matsukawa turns toward him. In return, he gives a knowing smile, and nothing more is said. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Things were supposed to go according to plan. On opening day, Tooru would put on his best suit, come to auditions at Sunrise Garden right after a fidgety day at school, and see Iwaizumi right after with a few hours to spare to spend time with him. He was going to ask about the clubhouse, and whether or not the lilac trees has bloomed yet, and about all the upcoming attractions the summer had to offer them. He'd laugh and hum and buy Iwaizumi some oden at closing time, then chirp about how sure he was about getting the part for that _summer show spectacular._

"Next up... _Oikawa Tooru._ "

But such things never go according to plan. Delays turn into lost minutes, lost minutes fuel the need to rush, and rushing just means an inevitable, irredeemable mess. 

"I am so happy to be here." Smiles are forced both ways. Tooru feels it all sting when he comes into his audition an hour late, suit soaked through by downpour and the heel of tight dress shoe ready to come off. He slicks his hair back, pretends the sopping wet look is intentional, and stifles the urge to break into tears. He wills himself into apologetic bows for the panel of judges in front of him, launches himself into his best impression of Peter Pan before realizing he's blanked on all of his lines. When he remembers them, he stumbles through them nevertheless, and ends up more like a hesitant visitor to _neverland_ instead of its ruler.

Naturally, no one seems impressed, but Tooru forges on anyway. He ends with a _good bye,_ Peter Pan’s last line to the now-grown Wendy before going back to neverland, a place too far away, a different dimension, and takes a deep breath when he delivers the lines.

"Good bye," Tooru repeats once more, nothing but a whisper. He stops himself from reaching out, and this is when he thinks he’s messed up the most: because in that instance those words leave his mouth, he pictures someone he shouldn’t have to say _farewell_ to just yet. _Good bye, Iwa-chan,_ he almost says, stopping the name short on his tongue, his usual feints betrayed by the quivering muscles in his face. Tooru almost wants to die right then and there, but stands still, a smiling shell. 

At once, the judges twitch in their seats, probably just as uncomfortable as Tooru is, their eyebrows raising before settling once more. All of them whisper and nod and scribble something down on their clipboards before offering polite grins, telling him they’ll be in touch.

"T-thank you." Tooru just bows once more (he thinks this is the most he’s ever _bowed_ in a single setting actually, sans the family funerals and other forms of _filial piety_ ) and rushes out of the back of the amphitheater.

Over the intercom, still sturdy in the wind and the rain, a harbinger of the worst kind says the _park will close in fifteen minutes._

Tooru wipes his face, sniffles back any sort of weakness, and sets towards the northern end of the park again. He pushes past the stream of people going towards the south, follows the people he cannot chase towards the north. He ducks under umbrellas and ignores all the grey haze up ahead, all the _pitter_ and _patter_ of the oncoming rain. When he sees the northern exit, five sets of toll booths not unlike the ones in the south, he stops short, watches the people stream through, and knows, instantly, that he cannot do the same. Anger builds in his temple like something about to pop, and he remembers the day he lost Mikan-chan. _I will have my way,_ he thinks like he did back then, because no bad day can be _just so_. _Let me find good in it,_ he thinks, past the propensity to downpour. _Let me find Iwa-chan,_ he doesn't mean to mutter under his breath, right into his sopping sleeve.

Tooru edges himself towards the northern exit, going shoulder to shoulder with the faceless crowd. He wonders what it'd be like, to pass through just this once, to actually see the world Iwaizumi sees. That could certainly make up for things, he thinks, but the questions loom heavy in Tooru's head, every single one he couldn't ask the spirit board: _What was it like on the other side? Were movie screens bigger? Did the spotlights shine brighter? Was there another Tooru_ _there, waiting for Iwa-chan? One that didn't mess up his lines and wowed the crowds? One that didn't rely on kokkuri-san or nights alone with his scripts and DVDs? One that was a natural, a_ real _and_ bona fide _natural at things? Did Iwa-chan find that version of him today? Was he going to leave this one behind?_

Under this made weight, Tooru just inches forward, reaching in a way he couldn't during the audition, determined to defy. He leans over the turnstile, pusing and pushing to make it budge, and keeps on it like a heavy stone. Tooru gasps when it moves—the motion of it fights him like a magnet repelling another, never quite meant to knock him back completely, but the force remains resilient, quiet in keeping the boy in his place. Over the rail, Tooru bears down on it once more, tears sneaking out over his cheeks, growls made low so no one can hear him.

On Sunrise Garden's opening day, the rain comes down cold, like tiny claws digging into the back of Tooru's neck.

Another set of hands, firm but not meant to hurt, hook onto the collar of Tooru's blazer and pull him back into the park. 

"Where do you think you're going?" Iwaizumi's voice sounds harried under the rain, deeper than before. Tooru finds the will to face him, and watches the rushed way he breathes in, wincing just to keep eye contact.

"Have you been running after me?" Tooru asks, swallowing down hard.

"Don't be so conceited," Iwaizumi gruffs right back. "How could you think of leaving without this?" He digs into his pocket and presents Tooru with a plain sealed envelope, name scrawled across the middle. Peering, Tooru just grimaces at it without taking the letter into his hands, already knowing what it entails. _We're very sorry, Oikawa-kun, but we've decided to go in a different direction._ He meets Iwaizumi back in the eyes, watches how his hope never abandons him.

(And at least they've had the courtesy to tell Tooru so swiftly this time, and with a messenger he'd never have the heart to kill.)

"There's no need for that," Tooru just tells him. "I know what it says." 

"You should open it anyway," Iwaizumi insists. "It could be good news, for all you know—"

"Well, I know it isn't," Tooru accidentally raises his voice. In turn, Iwaizumi doesn't yell at him back (even though he huffs like he might holding the urge in), and drags Tooru away from the gate. A security guard stops the both of them when they try to make it up the cobblestone, mumbles something about curfews and _Iwaizumi-kun you're already in huge trouble with your mother,_ but the boy just holds up five fingers and insists he'll be out soon. Behind him, Tooru follows along, right into an empty game booth half-closed for the day.

"I'm not opening it," Tooru says, settling in with a wall of overstuffed _Tikachus_. "I've been through a billion auditions, Iwa-chan, and I always know when I've done bad on them. I just feel it." 

"What, and trying to get past that gate's gonna make it better? All by hurting yourself? You dumbass." 

Tooru feels himself go into a deeper frown than before. "What do you mean by that, Iwa-chan?"

Iwaizumi fiddles with his jacket sleeve, one usually rolled up to his elbow crease, and Tooru makes out the sight of wrapped gauze.

"Iwa-chan? What happened?" Tooru asks. "Is it...does it..." he doesn't finish, opting to reach out instead, but Iwaizumi just hides it away, as tough as ever.

"It's just a sprain," Iwaizumi reassures him, shrugs included. "But it's a warning, too, I think," he explains, "about crossing into the sides that aren't yours. I was working on some lights by a southern fence yesterday when I fell off a ladder. And you know, I've been reckless as a kid, whatever, but...damn, it _felt_ like I got pushed off this time."

Tooru nods along. "So you understand, then? What this all is?" Discreetly, he takes the letter from the counter when Iwaizumi isn't looking and hides it away on his lap, just so he can't get back to nagging him about it.

Iwaizumi stares back from the window, and shrugs back. "I still don't, I guess, but I'd rather not place all my faith in weird stuff like that. It's just...I get a bad feeling about the south, and I'm sure you feel the same towards the other end."

Outside, the two of them watch the rain let up, like they've hit the eye of a tempest. "I'd just stay clear of my side, Oikawa. God knows you'll cry a storm if you bust that face of yours."

Tooru relents a tiny grin. "So you were looking for me, then," he says with the most confidence he's mustered all afternoon.

"Think whatever you'd like," Iwaizumi retorts right back, and the two of them let their world fall into near-silence. Under the static of a rescinding storm, Tooru paces his own breathing, finds a small calm, and remembers that silences can be comfortable.

It's funny, being with Iwaizumi. For someone he doesn't get to see as much as he'd like, for someone as otherworldly as another dimension itself, his heart reads homier than anyone he's ever known, like a sun-dusted hill, or a dusk at the end of a Miyagi day. He's just Iwaizumi, _just Iwa-chan,_ and with him Tooru feels no need to fill the quiet with the pleasantries, or the falsities he does with the others. _I can be whatever I want to be_ , Tooru tells himself, but, still upset from a blown audition and with Iwaizumi around, he knows it's important—that it's okay, maybe— _to be me._  

"I know you took the envelope, Oikawa," Iwaizumi tells him, a scold by the softest means. "You can build all the suspense you'd like, but you're going to have to find out sooner or later." 

Tooru keeps his hands gripped over the letter, fingers pressed against the paper in utmost stubbornness.

"But what if it's bad news?"

"And what if it's good?" Iwaizumi answers him quite simply. 

From there, Tooru says nothing at first. He just takes the liberty of raising the barricade over them, to let in the last of the storm in around them. Glances thrown behind him, Tooru watches Iwaizumi take in the skyline of the park, his sights never wonder-filled, or heavy with wanderlust; more than anything, his eyes are sure, surer than anything, and it is here where Tooru must remember who _Iwaizumi Hajime_ is. 

"Iwa-chan," Tooru calls out, all grave with gusto gone.

"Yeah?"

"Your family owns this park," Tooru remarks. "Which means reviving the shows at the amphitheater was their idea, right?"

Iwaizumi squirms, his arms folded in front of him. "So?" 

"Iwa-chan."

" _What_?"

"Are you certain that it's good news...because you asked those casting directors to give me the part?" Tooru asks in all horror.

Iwaizumi tears himself away from the sky, eyes shifting into something offended. Outside the shelter of their game stand, the rain has stopped completely, taking the clouds away with them, too, only to leave the two boys in unhindered clarity. By the newfound light, just enough for the end of the day, Tooru shrinks back against it, like doubting Iwaizumi could be the worse thing he could do. 

"It would be the easiest way, just handing you the part," Iwaizumi tells him. "But I didn't, because you're _better_ than that, aren't you?"

Tooru swallows down hard. He squints at the incoming sun, and how it always gets to close out the day.

"Iwa-chan," Tooru whispers out. He feels his system heave heavy and prickly, like he's swallowed a bunch of thumbtacks, and Iwaizumi shakes his head to ward him off once more.

"Don't get sentimental on me, Oikawa." 

"But—"

"But nothing. Just because I'm going to run this park one day means I'm going to hand you anything. Because you can stand on your own two feet, right? No matter what happens."

"No matter what?" Tooru dares to ask back.

"No matter what," Iwaizumi tells him. 

Tooru's eyes go wide and he relents a few hurried nods. He takes a deep breath and unearths the envelope from his lap, presses it against his palms on the counter, and looks back to his friend. Iwaizumi nods, gestures his head back to the letter, and waits for Tooru's next course of action.

When Tooru rips the seal, he finds no more than a few lines worth of an answer.

_We are pleased to offer you the role of Peter Pan as the second understudy, in the event that the main actor cannot perform his duties._

" _Understudy_."

"What?"

"I'm a second understudy for a show that's only playing _once_ ," Tooru repeats out to Iwaizumi, still trying to take the news in. He feels ache pool at the back of this throat. 

Iwaizumi nods along. "We can...we can work with that." 

"I'm not going to be in the show, Iwa-chan."

"You don't know that!"

Tooru knows that he should be thankful, considering just how terrible the audition went in the first place, but gratitude is not what washes over him, nor relief; he thinks about the last line of his read-through, that _good bye_ , one that might've taken a few years off his life just to deliver, one that he had put all his heart into, if he had to be honest with himself, and— _god, what good am I, why am I even doing this, what are you doing Tooru,_ and swallows back second place with little civility.

"Oikawa, come on, this isn't the end of the world."

_Not good enough_

_You can't be here, you're not meant to be here, go elsewhere, go elsewhere, go elsewhere_  

 _Not good enough_  

Tooru thinks that maybe some days were meant to have no good in them, after all.

_Not good enough_

"Oikawa!" Iwaizumi reaches out for him when Tooru rips the letter up and hops off the game stand stool. "Oikawa! Come on!" he yells once more, when he follows behind Tooru's mad dash back down the cobblestone. With no sign of new rain, Tooru just keeps on the path undisturbed, head down and steps burning under him, hands clenched until he finds fire in his palms. What a world to be in, the perfect answer to _neverland_ and all the fantastic places he's read about in books, sunrise to sunset, with all of its game stands and secret clubhouses and terrifying amphitheaters, their time-held traditions and hidden sons, sons like Iwaizumi, the one and only _Iwa-chan—_

"Oikawa!"

—and what a disappointment he must be, to the likes of all of it. To the likes of him. When he hits the southern end, Tooru passes through the exit like he's meant to, homeward bound and without Iwaizumi. He doesn't think of stopping for him. 

"Oikawa!" he yells out anyway, to Tooru. Distance marks the echo of it. "Stop! Come back!" 

 _I won't stop_  

_I'm not good enough to come back_

To the train station, Tooru runs. When the car pulls up on the tracks, he tells himself to shut out the marathon of voices in his head, to run them under the rumbling and the ruse of its white noise.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

When no one shows up for occult club a week later, Tooru keeps his sights on the spirit board, tempted but restrained by Matsukawa's urges to _clean up and go the hell home_. Tooru complies with a small nod this time, because it's not like he has the questions to ask today anyway—he'd much rather go home to catch some _Twilight Zone_ reruns with his sister this evening, maybe practice his lines for an upcoming scene in _Opposites Attract_ (which was coming to its end by summer, much to Tooru's detriment), so he doesn't consider himself at any sort of loss.

Still at his desk with a finger pressed against a new ten yen coin, Tooru sighs and lets Matsukawa speak on the matter of _serendipity_. From the way he's positively waltzing with the broom in his hand, Tooru finds it safe to say that his friend has had a much better time with his V.I.P. ticket than Tooru has so far.

"So, because you didn't want to go back with me yesterday, I went to the park alone," Matsukawa starts his story over again. "Man, they've changed a lot about it, you know? I heard some workers call it an _improvement phase._ Like they've started advertising for the theater revival, even broadcasted free lawn viewings for classic movies, which is more of _your_ thing, but..."

Tooru clicks his tongue. "Hey, no rubbing it in."

"What? Now that you can go anytime you want, you're suddenly not about it?" Matsukawa refutes.

"People grow out of things."

"In a matter of a _week?_ " 

Tooru shrugs. "Sure, one week when I was kid I went from liking banshees to aliens. The mind is fickle and unfocused," Tooru insists, all pleasant like a chant, or a literature teacher too involved in his students' coursework.

"There will be other auditions at _Sunrise Park_ ," Matsukawa says with much of the same theatricality, seeing right past Tooru's stints.

To this, Tooru just sticks his tongue out at him.

"Mature." Matsukawa rolls his eyes like he's telling Tooru, _all right you big baby,_ and finds his place back in the story. "As I was saying," he continues, "so I figured I wouldn't stay there so long, since it's kinda weird going by yourself. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna go to the roller coasters and make fun of the pictures they take when people hit a certain part of the slope."

"That's _mean,_ Mattsun," Tooru teases.

"Well, _opinions aside,_ I was just standing at the booth, watching all the pictures fly by, and man, I saw the funniest picture, funnier than—"

"Can you speed this story up, Mattsun?" 

"I was just getting there! Anyway, this picture came up on the screen, and I laughed harder than I ever have in my life. I swear, I thought I was gonna _collapse_. Well, lo and behold, this _other_ kid had the right idea, too. So then we just spent the rest of our time at that booth, making fun of folks." Matsukawa sticks his hands in his pockets, sighs like he's met the love of his life ( _ew_ ), and shakes his head because he can't believe it. "And that is the story of how I met Hanamaki Takahiro."

Tooru frowns. He's never heard of him before. "That's it?"

"What do you mean, _that's it?_ A beautiful friendship was made that day. We're going to meet at the park tomorrow, actually," Matsukawa asserts.

"Wait." Tooru's eyes go wide. "He's not from...you know—"

"Well..."

" _Mattsun_."

Matsukawa nods all solemn. "He is," he answers Tooru. "I mean, at least I think he is. All that weird opposite north-south stuff—heck, even his version of Kitagawa Daiichi's got rooms in all the wrong places, teachers teaching math instead of history...it's all messed up, but it works, I guess."

"Oh, so _now_ you believe me?" Tooru asks, incredulous, getting up from his desk to retrieve the dustpan in the corner.

"Well now, let's not get so carried away, but...let's just say it's not so impossible." At this, Matsukawa shrugs and leans back against the window. "But imagine all the people we're missing out on, the people were not meant to meet."

Tooru would prefer not to imagine, to dwell on such things. He kneels down by the dust bunnies, pretends to be preoccupied with their demise by bristled brush, but waits for Matsukawa to finish what he has to say. In the darkness of himself, Tooru hides by the hunch of his shoulders. By the light of things he can't help but steal glances from, he peers over the shoulder from his careful shelter.

"But you know what the park is just saying to all that? _Screw it_ ," Matsukawa says with a wily sort of grin. "Pardon the _sentimental_ , but...it's special." He nods, as if he's still accepting the idea for himself, and Tooru just dips back to face the ground.

"Special," Tooru repeats, because it's the truth. He just shakes his head, mashes his lips closed, and tries to free himself from such thoughts. "I guess you call it that," he adds, failing miserably.

Matsukawa sighs, and Tooru hears his feet tap on the linoleum below.

"He talked about you, you know," he tells Tooru. "Hanamaki, I mean. I don't think you two have ever met, but he goes to school with that _Iwa-chan_ kid, and he told me to pass a message along."

Tooru perks up from over his shoulder. "What did he want to say?"

" _Iwaizumi-kun's been extra grumpy since you ran off and it's all your fault, Oikawa Tooru. Please atone for your sins and report to Sunset Garden immediately_ ," Matsukawa imitates, extra breezy, holding a peace sign up at the end.

Tooru just grimaces. "That's not funny."

"Hey, don't kill the messenger, now." 

"Sorry." 

"Anyway, I'm leaving just in case you decide that you want some alone time with _kokkuri-san_ ," Matsukawa says, motioning towards the board. "Just remember to close it, before the ghosts come and haunt you." 

"They would never," Tooru tells him right back, honestly offended. 

"Okay, okay," Matsukawa insists, with one foot out the door. "See you tomorrow, Oikawa." 

"See you." 

And on one of those particular days where _alone_ feels just the slightest bit bad, Matsukawa says goodbye for the day and leaves Tooru to finish cleaning up himself. Feet tapping to keep busy, wandering to the tune of a song he's made in his head, Tooru finds peace at the windowsill, sun on his back and draft cooling the sweat on his neck. _It's getting hotter by the day,_ he thinks, and he begins to wonder what Iwaizumi might think of summer.

With a light smack to his cheeks, he scolds himself for always wandering back to him. 

Still, Tooru keeps down such paths and collects all the pieces; if that Hanamaki guy went to some version of Kitagawa Daiichi, and Iwaizumi was his classmate of all things, that would mean another part of their world was running in parallel. Tooru finds the nerve to scoff about it, because _what a joke this is,_ and peers over his shoulder at the empty room. In some other place, in this very classroom perhaps, Iwaizumi could be finishing up with his own club, or cleaning, or doing homework by himself at a desk in the corner, or chatting with a new girlfriend—

At once, and without finishing his menageries, a strong breeze comes flying from the window, sliding the kokkuri-san coin across the paper beneath it. Tooru watches it move on its own, past any dying draft after that—like kokkuri-san really, really might be here somehow. Inching closer without pressing a finger to the coin, Tooru watches it spell out Iwaizumi's name and waits for the spirits to say something more.

"Kokkuri-san, what...do you want to tell me?" he asks.

(Why don't you ask the right questions, Tooru?) 

"I'm in no mood to play with you today, kokkuri-san," Tooru insists. "I have a lot of lines to practice when I get home, and Eiko's already got some DVDs rented from the library and—"

The coin drifts dangerously close to the drawn torii gate to say goodbye.

" _Okay_! Okay," Tooru insists with a sigh. "I mean...you spelled out Iwa-chan's name. So I'm guessing the news has to do with him—like...what? Did he get a new girlfriend or something?"

(Don't be so silly, Tooru.) 

"It's hard to know what to ask, kokkuri-san!"

(Fine.) 

“ _Well_?” 

(Try location.) 

"If this is some ploy to get me back to the park, I already told Mattsun—"

(It's not.)

"Okay, then. _Where_ should I be asking about? The twilight zone?" (No.) " _Sunset_ Garden?" (Ha, nice try.) "I don't know! Here?"

(Yes.)

When the coin stops short at the upper right corner, all serious in its claims, Tooru freezes with it and takes his glances around the room. Still alone, with no one but _kokkuri-san_ and the silent breeze of mid-spring at his side, he shakes his head at the notion of Iwaizumi being here on the school grounds, too, because _here_ is everything _but_ that when it comes places outside Sunrise Garden. 

 _You could just go back,_ he tells himself like a constant itch. _You don't have to make this so hard. If you could just let go, just accept things for what they are—_

Tooru bites the inside of his cheek until he comes across just the right amount of ache. To kokkuri-san, he prepares one more question.

“Where?” 

Kokkuri-san does not answer right away, and the coin drags across the paper, slow in its trip across the _hiragana._ Tooru waits, putting the characters together to get two words. _Garden_ and _house._ Never the most straightforward, kokkuri-san just moves to a blank space between strokes, waiting for Tooru’s next question, but it doesn’t take him too long to figure things out. Without saying anything else, Tooru says his proper goodbyes to the board ( _“you’re not as mean as they say, kokkuri-san!”_ he says into thin air _),_ lifts the coin off the page to spend later, and folds the paper board back into his pocket to end things. He leaves the floors unswept, the desks disordered, all the windows half-opened, half-closed. He lets his feet take him down the hallway, even though he's not sure he wants them carrying him at all.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

"Iwa-chan?"

The greenhouse is in shambles, but Tooru convinces himself that it could be home. With a small and careful touch, Tooru traces his hands over taped cracked glass while he walks, and observes how the adhesive will never stand up to inevitable fissures; still, with hands off the pane, in the jungle of tipped-over pots and curtains of thick ivy, he looks on like he could tame it. He flinches when a few birds rustle in the branches of a few ruling trees, how the song of them sounds nothing like the ones he usually hears in his Miyagi, and decides that kokkuri-san has not led him astray this afternoon, either.

When the last fragments of sunlight peek in the spaces between foliage, all sorts of gold and coral and kaleidoscopic in effort, Tooru squints through it and grazes his fingertips over the long land of a wooden work table. Eyes kept all around, darting from the climbing vines to the obscuring cover, the violet wildflowers growing on shelf crevices and cracks in the cement under him, he recoils when he thinks he's contracted a splinter. Tooru brings the edge of his hand to his mouth in a light bite, but finds no pain, and glances back down on the tabletop. Another set of fingers flit across from him, and at once, Tooru recognizes the bandaids. They're the same ones Iwaizumi used to patch him up at his clubhouse, now wrapped around the soft part of his best friend's palm, and Tooru feels the need to ask about it.

"What happened to you?" he inquires, like he knows that Iwaizumi is on the other side of the ivy. Tooru swallows down the weird dryness in his throat, because it's not like they were meant to be apart for so long. This is what he tells himself, when he catches all the little fragments of Iwaizumi between leaves and the sleeping morning glories. He spots the tip of his nose, the deep brown of an eye, a ruddy cheek—and wonders if liminal spaces were meant to run this much interference. 

 "I was building sets," Iwaizumi answers Tooru all a-matter-of-fact. "Part of a pirate ship and a hanging crescent moon."

"Oh?" Tooru asks. "Tell me more about that. How's _Peter Pan_ going?"

"Didn't you run away just to _avoid_  hearing about it extensively?"

"Well, you brought it up," Tooru pouts.

"That's because I'm proud of my _crescent moon,_ " Iwaizumi admits. "But I'll say nothing more on the matter."

In the resulting silence, Tooru watches Iwaizumi's hands work on the table, how his eyes cloud over a ceramic pot he wants to glue back together. He guesses that Iwaizumi comes here on the days he's not at Sunset Garden, and he laughs when he thinks of him as some  _florist's ghost._  

"Iwa-chan?" When Tooru gleams back up, Iwaizumi does no such thing in return. Back at their hands, Tooru wraps one around his own wrist, to keep from reaching forward past the vines. But like he knows, Iwaizumi puts the pot shards down and breathes out a huffy sigh.

"Why haven't you come back yet?" the other boy asks, and this is when Tooru spots it: a glint of hurt flashes by Iwaizumi's eye, all in a second of strain before finding strength once more. 

Tooru straightens his back and turns his cheek up. "What is the point of having _dead weight_  around the theatre when you have your hands so full already?" he asks, stopping short of a gasp when he hears a pot break on the other side.

"Are you giving up, then?" Iwaizumi asks right back, and it is clear that he has worked himself up.

"I'm not. I didn't like that stage _anyway_ , I mean the acoustics were just all wrong _—_ "

"Oikawa."

Tooru bites his tongue and eats up every white lie. Overhead, the birds flap their wings and squawk at glass ceilings.

"I wasn't good enough, Iwa-chan," Tooru says in earnest. "I can blame the rain from that day, or difficult lines, but there's just nothing else to it. I wasn't good enough. And that _place..._ that place only wants the best. I can feel it. It _knows_."

Iwaizumi finds the nerve to scoff. "Like hell it does."

Tooru does reach over this time, and Iwaizumi doesn't move his hand away. Even with fingertips barely touching, Tooru feels the heat sear up his back anyway, and a draft come in through the doors on either end. When it rustles through the ivy leaves, Tooru gets better glimpses at Iwaizumi's face, though the new sight of cheek and a bit of a frown still doesn't feel like anything complete. 

"Then what do you think I should I do, Iwa-chan?" Tooru asks. "Come back when I'm better? When I can land all those leading parts with my eyes closed?"

"No," Iwaizumi tells him. 

"Then maybe I shouldn't come back at all _—"_

"Are you really going to make me say it, Oikawa?" 

Tooru inches his hand away until it is off the table, and he shifts away until he cannot see Iwaizumi at all. "Maybe," he squeaks out, meaning to flirt, meaning for it to be _mindless,_ just a reprieve from gravity and truth and _falling_ , but it comes out like an accidental plead, a real loss for words. "Yes," he ends up saying, barely in any real voice at all. "Yes."

"Oikawa—"

" _Iwa-chan_."

Iwaizumi breathes out, all huffy and annoyed but still willing to stay. Under the brush of foliage, his hands clench into patient fists.

"Fine, then. I'll say it. So what if you weren't good enough this time?"

"But you don't understand, Iwa-chan," Tooru says, feeling his voice rising. "That was an important show, and it should've been mine!" He gulps down, remembering the last delivery once more, that _goodbye,_ like it was really meant to be something parting. Because maybe the park had known all along— _you're good, Tooru, but just not good enough, we don't take anything less than the absolute best._

"That doesn't mean you should just lock yourself away!"

Tooru leans in closer, all without meaning to. "Acting isn't exactly a group activity, Iwa-chan," he answers Iwaizumi, and once more Tooru knows he is testing him, _always_ testing for the day that Iwaizumi will wise up and leave, because he cannot possibly be this good to him, because everyone has their limits, their inevitable ends, and Tooru cannot fathom being at his.

"But does going at it alone make anything better?" Iwaizumi asks, right on the verge of yelling. "I will make the amphitheater better, the _entire park_ better, and by the time you land that leading role, you'll have a place that's bright enough for you. For the both of us! So just keep working at it. Take the time to grow."

Iwaizumi clicks his tongue, and Tooru feels his face heat up on his side. He suppresses a tiny smile, but feels it wipe away when he hears Iwaizumi Hajime say the words, more honest than Tooru could ever be:

"Come back, Oikawa."

At the words, Tooru claws at the ivy. He knows he'll never reach Iwaizumi here, but he'll still try to call it home. Never mind about the amphitheater, or the clubhouse amongst lilac trees.

Never mind, never mind about the likes of Sunrise Garden.

"Come back," Iwaizumi says, voice all sturdy like stone.

 

* * *

 

For the next seven days Tooru spends in the greenhouse with Iwaizumi, he coins it the _quiet week_ , determines that they've found a suitable place to meet for lunch and after school run-ins, and spends much of it convincing Iwaizumi of the same. And despite his rebuttals—"I'm telling you, Oikawa, this roof will cave in by the next big storm"—the two of them fall into a sort of routine, unspoken and unplanned in their encounters, where tiny meals, painting projects, and practiced lines take precedence over the necessity to gab.

 

Sunday is beaming and casual, and Tooru keeps his _gakuran_ jacket slung over a wooden chair. With temperatures at soaring highs, the hottest since a Miyagi swelter in 1986, he pretends the greenhouse isn't _totally_  insulating them in this misplaced summer. Reminding himself that spring is still in session, keeping cool only to maintain his feints with Iwaizumi, he realizes that is harder said than done when the latter's got the nerve to hum in this damned heat.

"Oh, isn't it just lovely in here, Iwa-chan?" Tooru sighs out like a dream. "The greenhouse really lets the sun in, don't you think?"

Iwaizumi scoffs—much to Tooru's chagrin—and continues spray-painting a few fixtures for a pirate ship. " _I'm_ liking it, but you can stop pretending now. You're panting like a dog. Did you learn that from Mikan-chan?"

 "Mikan-chan did not do gross things like pant!"

"All dogs pant, Oikawa."

"Yeah, but he was _graceful_ about it."

After that, Tooru pretends to be angry at Iwaizumi. On his side of the ivy, he picks blooming flowers off the leaves, collects them in leftover mason jars, and slides them under the vines to his best friend's side.

"We could just stay here, you know," Tooru remarks through the pressed air, offhanded but not. At this, Iwaizumi says nothing at first, keeping the first of many silences. Through the hiss of a spray paint can, Tooru waits for Iwaizumi's answer, but gets nothing he wants to hear.

"This place won't last, Oikawa," says Iwaizumi, and the two of them leave it at that for the first day of the week.

 

 

 

 

Monday fends off Sunday's haze by the way of rain. On this particular day, Tooru runs around his side of the greenhouse with his mason jars from yesterday, collecting drops from cracks in the ceiling and wincing away the drizzle caught in his eye. With lunch unattended, he settles down to eat his milk bread after a while, because he tells himself this place isn't going to fall from just a little rain. 

On the other side of the ivy, Iwaizumi is weaving seashells into a fisherman's net. He is the first to  leave on this particular day, because lunch periods on his side end a total seven minutes earlier than Tooru's. "It's fine," Tooru insists, to both Iwaizumi and under his breath, because he will take whatever he can get,  _and at least I get_ _to_ _see_ _him_ _on_ _a_ _regular_ _basis, because seven minutes a day can't possibly add up that much, so it's fine, really, it's all okay. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine,_ he tells himself over and over, until he really makes himself believe it, and he falls into same rhythm of rain falling into mason jars.

"It's fine."

And when Tooru looks back on this particular Monday, he learns an important personal truth: trying hard might get you no where sometimes, and that might hurt like none other, but settling in large amounts might come in at a _second worst._

 

 

 

 

"It's fine," Tooru tells himself in between practicing lines for his last scene on _Opposites Attract,_ when Iwaizumi isn't even here on this Tuesday and he's left nothing but a folded note in one of Tooru's mason jars. It reads out like a to-do list more than anything—a doctor's visit for that sprained arm, more set-building, some lighting improvements for his clubhouse, homework—but Tooru likes hearing about these things all the same. They're mundane for someone set to inherit an entire amusement park, but Tooru appreciates the feeling of familiar ground, and the notion that people in the other dimension walk it the same way, too.

Tooru smiles down at the list before realizing how hard it is to hold it. Notes are nice, but they're nothing when the real thing isn't here. With eyes cast out the greenhouse, past the cracked and yellowing glass, he thinks of Sunrise Garden in vague amounts.

"It's fine," Tooru tells himself once more with a frown.

"It's fine," he only says once more on this particular Tuesday, when he finds how much it stings to stay on his tongue, even under his breath.

 

 

 

 

  

When Wednesday arrives at the greenhouse, it is barely so at 12:04AM, with all the light of day gone until morning and his sister, Eiko in tow. Tooru ushers her in like they've entered the world's greatest basilica, but she flicks her flashlight up in careful motions and shakes her head in quiet disapproval. "Hm," she hums with a shrug, going deeper into the greenhouse.

To the other side, Tooru tries calling for Iwaizumi, but no one answers. Tooru knew that one would be a long shot, given the midnight hour, but it doesn't stop him from writing notes for him to see in the morning. _I have to film something all day today, so I won't be here. Don't miss me too much, Iwa-chan_.

"Aw, are you writing a love letter to someone on the _other side_?" Eiko teases, as Tooru stuffs the note into a mason jar and rolls it under the ivy brush.

"It's for Iwa-chan."

"Like I said—a  _love letter,_ " she repeats back, distracted.

Tooru says nothing to this and just hops off the work table chair with his flashlight in tow. He flicks the light on a bunch of sleeping wildflowers, the two rustling trees, the overgrown grasses, the splendor of it all—but Eiko only sees the cracked glass and the burdened columns holding the place together. 

"Onee-chan," Tooru tries to start, but it's clear that she's already made up her mind.

"Tooru—this place is lovely," Eiko tells him,  all soft spoken, revering. "But it's not going to last. It's going to break down, like all the others."

 Tooru shakes his head. "Wait, no," he says. " _No_. What do you mean by that?"

Eiko clicks her flashlight off, and Tooru does the same for the time being. She has always said that ghosts hate the sight of them.

"This is all theory, mind you," she explains, "but I don't think liminal spaces are supposed to last. Whether they're one time deals, like a temple every few years or so, or a reoccurring one, like this greenhouse, the two universes will correct themselves. Think of it like...two finger pads, unsticking themselves from an accidental glueing."

"No, onee-chan. It can't—"

"What's the big deal? You have the park, don't you? Just let this one run its course." Eiko takes another glance at the premises, silhouette its nose up in true _Oikawa_ fashion. "Plus, as your older sister, I'm not sure I'm okay with you playing around here in this rickety house. Having Mikan-chan go was already shocking enough, you know..."

"That's morbid!"

"I'm kidding, I'm _kidding_...but Tooru, can you tell me something? Honestly?"

Tooru shakes his head. By shadows, Eiko probably pretends not to see.

"Can't you do better than this place?" she asks, and Tooru feels the early morning blow through him like he's not made of anything at all.

"Well, I have theory for you too, Eiko," he starts, composing himself.

"Yeah?"

"What if some liminal spaces are just to sacred to reach? What if it takes someone _really_ special to stay? Maybe some people are meant for it, and others aren't." 

Eiko sighs out. "But _special_ is what you make it, Tooru."

Tooru thinks back to the kid playing Peter Pan in the play, how wonderful he must be. He thinks back to Iwaizumi Hajime and his brilliant hands, mixed in the care of building sets and his base amongst the lilac trees, a builder in the making. But what could Tooru be? The finest character actor his age had ever seen? Teenage heartthrob? Award winning thespian? He thinks back to all the great actors of various golden ages, the characters they played, the people they fooled off screen and in the seats below, and thinks about the shoes to be filled, the houses he still felt too weak to walk into.

"What does _special_ even mean in the long run, Tooru?"

In the darkness, Tooru peers up at the sky and chooses not to answer. Past Kitagawa Daiichi's sports fields, past the streetlights keeping the stars from view, Tooru sees them just fine up above. In the whirr of silence, crickets slow but ready to come out in the passing of seasons, in the wind blowing through both dimensions, Tooru hears the greenhouse creak out, like some interlude before the last song on an album.

 

 

 

 

 

On Thursday, Tooru gives Iwaizumi a few helpful suggestions. It is late after school, and the both of them are working on math problems on opposite pages (from Tooru's page seventy-five to Iwaizumi's fifty-seven) and passing erasers back and forth over the ivy. Math happened to be Iwaizumi's best subject, while it had been Tooru's absolute worst, so the last two hours had been littered with jargon about negative numbers and the horrid application of English letters in algebra. Still, through all of Tooru's complaints, Iwaizumi hasn't barked at him once; minus a few grunts or some muttered curses over not being able to solve something, he's been as patient as Tooru could hope to expect.

"Iwa-chan, you've been so helpful today," Tooru giggles out, squinting past the day's high winds. "You know how I should thank you?"

"You don't," Iwaizumi corrects him with a scoff. "I don't want anything you're offering."

"Aw, come on, Iwa-chan," Tooru insists, extending hands under the ivy curtain, all in frenetic, wriggly spirits. "Just hear me out! It's about the greenhouse."

"Not _this_ again."

Under the forming dusk, Tooru peers up at the cracks in the ceiling, hears the foundation creak in echos. Leaning over the table, never able to put on his full weight over the fear it might break, he smiles with something uneasy and put on. In soft bedside coos, the house tells him, _this is not the place for you, because this place will be no more_.

"Just listen!" Tooru forges on despite it, loud enough to disturb any dying peace. "With my bright ideas, how you like to build, we can really make it work, I think. Picture it like a second clubhouse, we could clear out the weeds and fix the leg chairs—"

"But, Oikawa—"

"And we can even string up curtains! Plant new things! You know, I've always wanted an herb garden, and I love the smell of lavender. _Oh_ , and what about a new bookshelf to keep my scripts? Do you know how to craft a coat rack? What about rigging some lights and—"

"Hey, no—"

"It'll be just a place for us, and none of our _Kitagawa Daiichis_ need to know, right?" Tooru continues on, all spun up whirlwind-style. "It'll be great, because we can _make_ this place great. It's still got a good couple of years left, and if we work hard, we can make it forever!" Tooru raises his hands to the sky.

Up above, squawking birds lift off in droves, done for the day and ready for slumber. The house moans out in protest, and Iwaizumi picks up a bout of silence.

"Iwa-chan?"

Iwaizumi breathes in on his side of the ivy, and a stutter emerges like a croak at the back of his throat.

"Iwa-chan, we could—"

"But I don't want to," Iwaizumi finally tells him, trying not to turn it into a bark. "Whatever it is you want to do here, I don't want any of it."

"And why not?" Tooru asks on the other side.

"Because I've told you time and time again. There's no saving this house. If I had gotten to it a year ago, _maybe_ I could've, but not now. And hell, I don't even _like_ being here," he continues, stopping short with a small _fuck_ , a curse that some of the other kids in his class have picked up, too. "And you know what? We shouldn't  _have_ to be here. Fine by me, if you don't want to come back to the park, but there are still better places than this anyway."

Tooru frowns, smacking a cheek to stop it from going redder than it already has. He rewinds back in the conversation, swallows up that  _I don't even like being here_ with something heavy—but not necessarily _bad_ , though—and forges on. "So why come to the greenhouse in the first place?" he asks. "If you hate it?" 

Iwaizumi doesn't say anything at first. He rolls another click off his tongue, then breathes out a crisp and wavering sigh, like a breeze rolling off a tree bough. 

"Iwa-chan?" Tooru says, peeking through the elusive ivy. Again, he only catches glimpses of Iwaizumi all still on the other side—his blotchy nose, like people really do blush in the strangest places, a big forehead, the sight of scrunched eyebrows—and at once, he thinks he might know the answer. Tooru tears away the moment Iwaizumi finds him in between the cracks, and waits for the words, the affirmation. Between the seconds, he makes he imagines the things that Iwaizumi could say: _b_ _ecause you're my best friend._ _Because things are better when we get to be together. Because you're Oikawa Tooru, that weird kid who does commercials and watches the Twilight Zone with your sister, who plays kokkuri-san on Tuesdays, who still sleeps with that same stuffed bear from Sunrise Garden all those years ago. Because whatever it is we have, magic or not, it's here to stay, and we're not going anywhere._

"Iwa-chan?"

But Tooru never hears Iwaizumi say such things. Because most times, the unspoken will stay that way, remaining the goosebumps on skin, or deep breaths before white lies. Perhaps they'll stay the wrinkles on worried foreheads, or the frowns all too impossible to hide. 

"Because you're here," Iwaizumi answers anyway, because as much as Tooru tries to surprise people, he forgets that his best friend can do the very same. Tooru bites down on his lip and leans over, hands weaving through the other side. Oh, how he might like to see him right now. Past the ivy, all in full.

Overhead, the wind kicks up, almost too violent for the both of them to stay. Dead leaves whir, and the house creaks in an old sort of pain. More glass breaks, and the ivy curtain lifts from their view.

Tooru smiles at Iwaizumi, and it is tinged with something sore. He knows it should feel like getting the world back, but there's something too small about the house to claim any sort of victory. 

"What's wrong now, Oikawa?"

"Nothing," Tooru just proclaims in his white lie, as the winds die back down. "I'm just thinking that it'll all be fine. I'm fine here," he insists, because he's always been good at keeping the other things unsaid.

But oh, how small it really, really feels. Oh, how he might like to see Iwaizumi in full.

 

 

* * *

 

 

By Friday morning, it is all gone.

Iwaizumi was right about things, about the storms that make things clean, and how the greenhouse stood little chance against it. With broken glass at his feet, Tooru kneels down by it and picks out a mason jar, still in tact, and hides it in his bag for later. When the other kids whisper about the ghosts reclaiming what was there's, or how there really was a pinch of magic in its confines, Tooru stiffens and pretends they could've had it all here, and that a pinch's worth was more like a full body shiver. Still, despite all his pretending, his efforts at convincing himself of such great loss, he can hardly muster up the grief. In fact, with eyes kept ahead, light rain still falling over the shambles, Tooru wonders why he's never felt lighter before.

_"I heard ghosts were passing love letters to each other in there."_

_"Folded paper in glass jars?"_

_"Yeah, that's it! You heard about those, too?"_

_"Of course! Oh, I hope they get to be together."_

_Love letters._ Tooru scoffs at the notion. Past the chatter, he thinks about Eiko's words and her theories, how liminal spaces all fold over into the next, how they were never meant to last, and thinks that some might stand taller than others. How specific others, maybe, allow for the possibility of  _forever._

With levity padding his feet, Tooru doesn't feel strange about walking away. During the school day, past workbook assignments and awful chalkboard attempts, he dreams of a certain house under the lilac trees. He remembers the curve of that dreaded amphitheater stage, and the lights strung up above the half-closed game stands. He lets every thought carry, past all the apologies he has to make to Matsukawa, because he knows he's not listening again, and he's caught himself mentioning _poltergeists_  for filler again. Luckily, he never takes offense—Matsukawa just insists on getting to the park before closing time today, because it's never right to keep someone waiting too long for things.

To this, Tooru agrees. He's so antsy he doesn't make it through the rest of the school day, finding himself on a train to Sunrise Garden instead of leading another session of _kokkuri-san_ and the occult club. He keeps a script for _Peter Pan_ all rolled in his hands, breath held over being let back into the play.

When the directors take one look at him and say,  _you're lucky we like you,_ Tooru counts his blessings once more. He folds the rehearsal schedule carefully into the mason jar after writing something down on the page and runs out the side of the amphitheater like he once did on opening day. Past all the rides, the game stands, the shouting guards, and five minutes until closing time, he finds the blooming lilac trees in the dusk, the lights strung up overhead to guide him, and a house quite small but strong in its own right. Outside, Iwaizumi is sitting on the roof, ladder on the side, half a sandwich on a napkin, with a hammer busy nailing down new shingles. 

"You were right, Iwa-chan," Tooru tells him, trying too hard not to beam. "The greenhouse fell apart during a storm last night. Did you see?"

"Of course I did." Iwaizumi still doesn't look up. "What did I tell you? The greenhouse wasn't meant to stand."

Tooru takes his place against the front door of Iwaizumi's house, breathes in the smell of full-swing spring and the changes that occur, and clutches the jar in his hands.

"Did you know I'd come back here?" Tooru asks. "Even though I said I wouldn't?"

"No," Iwaizumi answers bluntly, looking out over the park, past the trees. "But it's better than that old place." 

Tooru looks down at his shoes. "I hope so, too," he interjects, and the two of them grow quiet as ever.

After a while, Iwaizumi comes down from the roof, wipes his hands clean of the dirt and the grime, and stands next to Tooru by the door. When the latter puts all his weight against the wood, he finds the hard wall of something that might last.

"Here," Tooru says, handing Iwaizumi the mason jar with the folded schedule inside. With a scribbled permanent marker, the note reads,  ** _I'm going to be in the play._**

Iwaizumi just scoffs, hands the schedule back to Tooru, and climbs back on the ladder to keep working. "Not hiding anymore?" he asks, picking his hammer back up. The first  _thump_  rings all thunderous, like Iwaizumi's put a little more into his swing this time.

"Never for long," Tooru beams right back. "Because I'm going to make it work this time. Just you watch!"  
  
Iwaizumi sighs and shakes his head. A smirk emerges, all light on his face, but Tooru doesn't dare to ask for anything more.

"I'm counting on it," his best friend says anyway, when he throws Tooru a spare key to the house at hand.

 

 

 

"Welcome back, Oikawa."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a Saturday when Iwaizumi Hajime takes his seat in the audience for the exclusive summer showing of J.M. Barrie's  _Peter Pan_ , right in the middle row where Oikawa might not be able to see him. He watches the sets come and go, all of his built crescent moons and pirate ship mastheads, the woven nets, and  _Big Ben_ clocks, and clutches his bandaged hands at the month's worth of toil.

"Oh, these children are splendid, aren't they?"a grandmother whispers about Peter Pan and his leading lady, Wendy, their steps buoyant across the stage, harnesses lifting them up to fly. Hajime merely nods back at her, only pretending to understand the dazzle of it. This is something he would never, ever admit to Oikawa, but he still doesn't know much about the craft of acting; when he finds his attention glazing over for the twentieth time in a span of an hour, he starts pinching himself to  _stay focused._

"It's lovely, watching them transform into all these different characters, all to the point where you can't recognize them."

When another act commences, the sets slide away from tropical forrest to _coral cove._ Hajime remembers the extensive plaster work needed on the _rocks,_ how he had only gotten to paint the shells for the set, and takes in its splendor for the first time since the show's inception. He watches the stagehands wave metallic blue cloth from across both ends of the stage, how it effortlessly it creates an aquarium's light throughout the amphitheater, and holds his breath when he hears the flirty laughter of _the boy who couldn't be Peter Pan._ The warmth of its sound floods the entire place, and at once every whisperer is silenced.

Oikawa Tooru emerges from behind a plaster coral rock, gold dust on his cheeks, shells and tiny _forget-me-nots_  woven in his hair.  _Mermaid number one_ floats his hands through the air when he teases Wendy, the pretty sheen of his green tail streaming like a brook's modest waterfall. He is mischievous and mean, but all in the right kind of way, and the entire audience laughs with all of his perfect deliveries.

"Just wonderful," the grandmother next to Hajime practically gasps. "This is what I mean."

All sorts of proud, eyes unable to tear themselves away, Hajime just nods. He leans forward just to get a better look, completely entranced. "He's worked hard for this," he can't help but remark.

"Oh? Do you know him, young man?"

Iwaizumi would like to think he does. When he watches Tooru toss his hair back, all to giggle and pretend and preen, he notices the way his eyes flick to the audience—just for that one, fleeting moment—because they both know that _afraid_ is something that never leaves someone. Still, as soon their eyes meet, he lets Oikawa tear away in that instant, because he needs to finish his part of the show. All at once, Oikawa Tooru shows everyone why he is a showstopper, grand and like a god. But Iwaizumi knows he is also a boy hiding in houses, looking up at ceilings he might not be able to break. When he decides that someone can be both, and that this is okay, he squints at the sight of his best friend and answers her in full faith.

"I do."

 

(And he's sure, at that moment, that Oikawa Tooru is the most beautiful thing he's ever, ever seen.)

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a fun chapter to write, with references to both Japanese and western cinema and film (something that has been tons of fun to research). I won't say a lot this time around, only that writing Oikawa Tooru as a character still comes as a refreshing (and fun!!) challenge to me. Next chapter: the start of their later teenage years, as I will be engaging in sort of a time skip! ANYWAY, see you around :^)

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to chat with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/iwakages) or [tumblr](http://companions.tumblr.com)!


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